—
Since I’m only a half-mile away, I will be at the space for SPEAK tonight, just in case some of the folks who aren’t online show up. I doubt much will happen. We’ll reschedule the “hunger” theme for another night.

Drop a comment or a line if you are coming, just so I know.

—
I have a crazy day, so won’t be around much.

—
Snow again. 5-10 inches, depending on where you are.

Baby, we got us a WINTER.

—
This note from the Pharmaceutical Poets’ Society:

Medications, properly prescribed to the right patients, can help. There’s almost no such thing as “always bad” or “always good” when it comes to these meds. (I preclude from this obviously flawed meds like Halcyon.)

Using a drug as a panacea, not having adequate therapy, not monitoring it correctly, not including proper spiritual/dietary/lifestyle guidelines, and (most of all) incorrectly prescribing the drug for mild or even NON EXISTENT issues IS wrong.

I am tired (old story) of losing friends who refused treatment because they were afraid of losing their creativity, their souls, or because of some false notion of not wanting to give in to Big Pharm.

Big Pharm sucks, yes. They push and hype the meds beyond the point of sane usage. But it doesn’t mean that the drugs are automatically of no value.

Save your credibility, by all means; save your creativity, and be skeptical of every claim. Do your research.

But recall, please, that death and catatonia and total dysfunction don’t make you a particularly productive artist, either.

Johnny Auschwitz

Call me what you want, pretending that
cherry rivers and greasy smokestacks
are all mine for which to atone.

It’s true, there are miles of burned skin dangling from
my heels. I’ve dragged that stinking trail behind me for years.

Don’t be so quick to turn from me.
I checked and you’re still at it.

You’re all still sorting — unkempt from neat as a
needle, their dead flags from your live one.
Red over blue, cross over crescent,
dark over light, pyramid over star.

Offer me something
to make me stop laughing at you

and maybe I’ll go away.

A break from the crap I’m doing at the moment.

Steven Colbert is on “Fresh Air.”

They are making a “Strangers With Candy” movie.

It had better be good…

Please for your attention:

This today’s word is:

UVULA!

Please, again and thank you, for to be making each reply here be of sentence containment of the word of today.

Then we will continue this amusement by someone else to have choice of word their journal next day.

Again, to the happy mirthmaking!

Pleasure for all! I begin with short poem of Japan and bastard version:

Thy uvula has
such perfect lineaments!
Ah, lump in my throat!

You of course may be of prose making reply, ha ha!

Thus we start this amusement and pleasure to follow in great amounts of big fun!

Roughly 2 feet of powder.

Roughly 10 degrees out. Wind chill well below zero. Still blowing around and drifting.

Nothing moving: state of emergency declared.

I’m shoveled out, cars moved, driveway plowed. Going out to clean up in a few.

No Hut tonight for this boy…sorry, kids.

Have a ball and stay warm, NE crew.

Four bottles lined up
on the desk in front of the screen.
I keep them in order to make sure
I take them right, though in fact I take them

left to right, in the hope they’ll make me
right, less prone to stupid associations,
puns in place of thought, overripe
feelings.

I visit them three times a day:
once when I rise, before descending to the kitchen;
once in the afternoon;
once before sleep.

At night there’s a cat on the bed
and a night light in the corner:
charms against the void because
the pills are good, but not good enough.

In these early hours the cat and I sit in front of the screen
and he knocks the bottles down like dominoes.
Then I pick them up and put them back in order.
One for stability, another for the same, one to pick me up,

and one to keep me from going out and barking at imaginary cars.
The cat’s pleased, and as usual knocks them down again.
I pick them up again, sick to my stomach
at how long I’ve been playing this game.

Blizzard conditions.

18-26 inches.

Fucking cold.

Fucking windy.

Fucking fuck.

On the Junction Street sidewalk
a body is almost ready to be taken away.
Daylight’s not being kind to him.
The flies touch and go in rising numbers.

The stain on the sidewalk looks like an umbrella,
but that won’t keep the rain from washing it off.
Someday, maybe, but not today.

The tense cops wait for the technicians to finish.

Two kids in the watching crowd
push each other around, and their fathers come to blows.
Bloodlust, once freed, is contagious.

On the fringe of the ugly crowd
a shrunken man knows he’s currently unaccused
and likely to remain that way. Tonight
he’s going to sleep well.

Kill or be killed?
The difference is so small sometimes
that you need to wipe the blood away to see it.

The storm’s upon me, I will bow and submit.
I will sit on the rocks by the shore.
I will watch the waves come over me.

I will launch from the rocks,
slide under the waves,
and drown.

In the morning you’ll find a body like mine
with seaweed in his hair and long lines
of green stretched behind him like contrails.

I won’t be there. I’ll be long gone.
Where am I headed?
To places where the body is unwanted.

The world is vast and
open if you travel
unencumbered.

MMMMMmmmm…imperial.

Can you smell what the King is cooking? Smells like meat to me.

THE WRONG POEM

This is not your poem, Eliot, Pound, Shapiro.
This is not your poem, Teasdale, Frost, Ferlinghetti.
This is no poem of yours, dear Walt, dear Emily, dear Maya.

Mostly,

this is not a Kerouac poem
with its eye on the horizon, stumbling drunk
from a ditched Cadillac somewhere just west of convention.
This is not a Ginsberg poem
flush with outrage and happy to shock the mundanes
with news of the most sensible things in the world.
This is not a Snyder poem, clinging to a mountain
wearing a tiny hat. Not a Corso poem, grand thug holler,
a diPrima poem slipping past the boys into the front row,
and it could never be a Kaufman poem, because nothing can be that isn’t already.

This poem smells like a scorecard in a gutter.
This poem slides a video under the teller’s window and withdraws the meager change.
This is not a recording, a television show, a commercial for its own last rites.

This poem eats scraps and makes sense.

This poem doubles back upon itself and tries to become a world
where a drunken mountain can fall on a car
and a cranium licked with fire shines cat’s eyes from within.
This poem wants to be
the psalm that rises when something that has not mattered becomes holy.

I will never be a writer until this poem is done.
I will never be a poet until I do not make another poem
about another poem
for as long as I live.

THE WRONG POEM

This is not your poem, Eliot, Pound, Shapiro.
This is not your poem, Teasdale, Frost, Ferlinghetti.
This is no poem of yours, dear Walt, dear Emily, dear Maya.

Mostly,

this is not a Kerouac poem
with its eye on the horizon, stumbling drunk
from a ditched Cadillac somewhere just west of convention.
This is not a Ginsberg poem
flush with outrage and happy to shock the mundanes
with news of the most sensible things in the world.
This is not a Snyder poem, clinging to a mountain
wearing a tiny hat. Not a Corso poem, grand thug holler,
a diPrima poem slipping past the boys into the front row,
and it could never be a Kaufman poem, because nothing can be that isn’t already.

This poem smells like a scorecard in a gutter.
This poem slides a video under the teller’s window and withdraws the meager change.
This is not a recording, a television show, a commercial for its own last rites.

This poem eats scraps and makes sense.

This poem doubles back upon itself and tries to become a world
where a drunken mountain can fall on a car
and a cranium licked with fire shines cat’s eyes from within.
This poem wants to be
the psalm that rises when something that has not mattered becomes holy.

I will never be a writer until this poem is done.
I will never be a poet until I do not make another poem
about another poem
for as long as I live.

to myainsel,ted_badger,rainbows27,and theryk for coming out to the feature at Jester’s last night.

It was nice to actually have an audience…and seriously, the fact that people who see me all the friggin time would come an hour out of their way for the gig was moving on a day when I needed it.

Thanks. Thanks, especially, to myainsel, a damn fine riding-shotgun kinda companion. Good conversation out and back.

I did a set of almost entirely new stuff with a few ancient pieces thrown in by request, including “Penitent,” “Balboa Harbor”, “Magellan Song”, and closing with “As Slow As Possible.”

New poems included “Pottery,” the cheery family poems “Reptile Son” and “Sing Before Seven,” “Meta” (rapidly becoming a good new opener), “FireBoy,” “Kiss in a Chicago Garage,” and the tsunami poem, which I think goes beyond topical to something more lasting…not sure yet.

Did I do anything else? I don’t recall. They’re mostly ones online here, if you’re interested.

I’m actively trying to transition the set out of “slam mode” where I depend on the old stuff to wow a crowd. Eventually I’ll blend these into the mix — but it was nice last night to just let it hang out and go with this new stuff…because I think I need to.

A lot of it is more personal than I let myself speak of. Me, the guy who prides himself on “it’s all creative writing, don’t look for the literal me in there.”

Well…the literal me may not be, but there’s a lot more of who I am hanging out there than I like to admit to myself.

The sunset through the lake trees like
a breaking mandolin. Bright shards
thrown off at crazy angles. Its snapped music heard
all at once, not in sequence, not
as melody. Light’s
often like that here. There’s no song to it, just
a long day’s decay.

Trying to remember you —
you played the mandolin, or the guitar;
there was some instrument. Something
shapely. We sat on the dock
and pretended to be hovering
above the water on our own. Trees darkened
across the lake and all the swallows
came out to feed. Night time, final songs,
the last note of the strings banged too roughly
into the case.

Sunset these days, everyday, an instrument
of no music. A sound on the wrong edge of lovely.
A blank look on the lake’s face.
One swallow. One cricket. No moon.

A man who should go down to the water to play
but instead sits on shore,
not moving, tone-deaf and dry.