if you are the offspring of an interracial relationship
but appear to all intents and purposes to be “white”
and are fully aware of what privileges have been accorded to you
because of your appearance,
do you have a moral obligation to make sure
that when you are called “white”
you correct the speaker and refuse that label?
MY OWN OPINION: fuck yes. every fucking time.
there are times when the best thing you can do for all around you is to speak up, say your piece, and then shut up and suffer the consequences in silence.
the act of speaking up does not guarantee that you will get the results you want, but it’s still important to do it.
you may be lonely as hell afterward, for a long time, but you will be the better for doing it.
Continue readingin my role as performance poet:
1. record a CD
2. put up a personal website
3. change my name
4. slam
5. appear on Def Poetry Jam
6. do a commercial for something profitable
7. change my appearance
8. go on a reality show
9. join academia
10. go on a reality show based in academia
things i have done/will do:
1. write my ass off
2. read well
3. be more generous to the poets around me
4. listen
5. read others’ work
6. stop using my mental illness as a crutch for shoddy behavior
7. admit that i value immortality for my work far more than my own longevity
8. admit that i am nonetheless afraid to die
9. stop letting fame be so important to me
10. return to first things and begin again
You Have Just Entered “Famous Dadaists and Surrealists” Chatroom
hawtjarry201: my milkshake brings all the buoys to the abbatoir
xxxxsdali420: <—– 93" unscathed
hawtjarry201: ROFLMAO*
hawtjarry201: this is the sorrow of the lobster's descent
cestunepipe: this is not a chatroom post
hawtjarry201: TTFN
OK, have at it.
*=Rolling on the floor lamenting my atmosphere, Osama
Pepe Le Pew Falls In Love Online
ah, my friend, the internet,
she is like the flirt!
all the time pretending that she is out there
solid as a good baguette when
truly she is a stale and fickle loaf
good only for serving memes and spam and no reason
to respond — ah, the Nigerian scammers! mwa, mwa, mwa!
ah, the penile enlargers! the generic druggists! mwa, mwa, mwa!
i shall, my darling internet, learn to hold you as the tenderest lover,
knowing all the time that you are fragile and only as deep
as I make you to be in my shallow eyes — ah,
the teen beauties! ah, the poetry pathetique! mwa, mwa, mwa!
ah, the bloggers, we who yearn for each others’ hands
to reach out and hold us, warm with comfort
and a perfume
like warm bread!
The man who works these hours has heard a lot of stories from people who swear that they are killers.
Are they true stories? They are certainly real stories, in the sense that they exist.
He tends to shrug them off as being routine — or even routines, as the tellers have told them so many times they don’t change a word from one telling to the next.
It could be said that this would indicate their objective truth; it could indicate a long-rehearsed falsehood; it could denote a certain rote or ritual nature to the telling that has long ago created a fundamental irrelevancy to the stories’ objective truth.
Each teller approaches the man on the night shift, no matter how long they have known him, as if he is once again their first time and only time confessor.
He must nod, act frightened or sympathetic as is required by the teller before him, and send them on their way until the next time.
The man who works these hours must be efficient in his feigned empathy toward the storytellers. Nights are only so long. There are only so many deaths one can squeeze into them. He knows that there are only so many opportunities for a guilty man to squint, imagine the open face of a caring man before him in the night, and with a leaden sigh begin to tell a tale he swears is true.
This is what the man who works these hours does. It doesn’t matter to him what the particulars of anyone’s story are, as long as all the telling is done before dawn.
of four straight days of 8-5 classes is over.
There are times when i love my job and times when i don’t.
i’d rather be writing poetry. in general, i’d rather write poetry than eat. i’d rather write poetry in general.
i have little desire to pursue a life outside of a poem.
I go into several days of 8-6 insanity at work.
I will now attempt to get several hours of sleep before I wake up again far too early.
I will not be posting any poems during this time period.
…snort…snicker…
Yeah, right.
I swear lately that I think in poetry, as Victor once said of Ellyn Maybe. (Not that I’m comparing myself to her…I’m taller, for one thing.)
It’s not entirely a good thing. I can’t seem to deal well with life outside of my understanding of it inside a poem. Gotta climb out if i’m going to maintain equilibrium and stop alienating everyone.
I will likely be up later, as always.
Saw a picture of someone
and she said it was
the best she had ever looked
I thought about that and decided that
the best I ever looked
was when I was 22
That phase only lasted about fifteen minutes
but I will forever recall
how in the middle of the seventh minute
Trish Powell asked me to turn around
so she could see my ass in my jeans
But today I looked
in the bedroom mirror
at saggy fat ass me
with the wizened eyes and the graying hair
and the patches of sad fact everywhere
smarter than I have ever been
and saggy fat ass me said
start that motherfucking clock
back
up
i have prescribed remedies at hand. ambien, seroquel and the like.
i just hate how dull they make me feel the next day.
i feel more alert after two hours of unmedicated sleep than i do after eight hours of drugged sleep.
maybe i was not meant to sleep regularly. maybe i am one of those who find other ways and sleeping at night is a form of social conformism.
maybe i’m just scared of the dark, of oblivion.
i don’t really dream, so there’s not even a chance at entertainment. maybe sleep is just fucking boring and i stay up because it’s more interesting.
or maybe it’s because i see too many faces when i close my eyes.
I stayed home from work today because I was up all night.
Here’s why.
Dead Reckoning
1
You say, can I please live here?
The first word you think of
when you sit down to write is always “left” –
as in left turn, left behind, left over, left hand.
You start over there and move over here
but when you start again it’s another start
from just where you were last time.
Just once you want to stay where you end up.
2
Dead reckoning is
the art of predicting where you will end up
if you keep doing what you are doing.
It does not take into account
current or drift.
3
There are rare times when you end up
somewhere luminous.
I talked for an hour last night with a boulder
that rose from the roadside dark on the way home,
as gray as if lit from within.
The hump of granite said
it preferred to remain still for fear
of learning more than it could handle.
Before I turned away
I kissed it and forgot myself.
4
Legend has it that Death will find you
even if you run to another city.
Death was thinking you were supposed to end up
in that other city anyway. Death
moves on its accustomed course, you move
on your accustomed course, the edges of the world
converge at the vanishing point.
5
Go out to find your bones.
Fall upon the rocks on the coast.
Ask one of them what it’s like on the other side.
You will learn that they were left behind
when the world split and the far coast moved away from them.
You will dive in and struggle forward, promising
to return with news.
There is something waiting out there, you know.
It waits unsure of how the two of you ended up
so distant from where you were supposed to be,
from where you were supposed to stay.
hung out and watched the Sox, then did a little bookstore time, then hit a bar for a bit.
just thought you should know…film at 11.
he is momentarily distracted by the light
exposing
the vicious lungs
the knowing eyes
the frozen cheeks
the ardent voice
the hypodermic filled with a poison bible
the teat of bile
the fly on the ball
the leftover privilege
the revolver dog
the massage of iron seraphim
the candle of blue veins
here is the relict of Buchenwald
here is the tallow of black magnolia fruit
here is the kindest loin of a tombstone
here is the good gambling father of a bludgeon
he blinks
turns back to his work and chews his way out of a corpse
Dark Matter 