I think about all the things I said today
I wonder if it was alright
All the things I said
Were my words enough to sooth my girl
she needed a good cry
Did I sooth my girl
Were they truth, the feelings, did I hold back enough
Did I boast too much or linger too long
All the things I say I need them good enough for two
All the things I say make them good enough for two
Did I wake with alarm
the birdong
sirens through the window
Did the black squirell make you smile
the little child make you cry
Did I run the water too long
Did we drink all the wine
I can't remember what was said
or if it was true
as long as I said it to you and no one else
All the things I say I need them good enough for two
make them good enough for two.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Dogs---research based revision
Chris caught me staring at his dick. We were peeing into empty apple juice jars in the shade behind our houses and his urine poured out yellow from a hairy dark dick. I pointed at the ground, where his pee drissled about the bottle. “Its mellow yellow.” His younger brother Jimmy laughed. The most JImmy and I could muster was a pathetic clear offering from bare testicles. I was going to freeze our urine in ice cube trays and put them in my sister’s coke.
“I got a dick as hard as Superman’s elbow.” Chris said, shaking off the rest and letting it pass.
Jimmy was cute poor kid--t-shirts too long and dirty. He had the brown eyes and cropped black hair of his kin. The two brothers were half-Mexican suburban rats who smoked cigarettes and got wet and knew how throw a punch. The day before we we’re knocking knotty crabapples into the creek behind our houses and I got pushy with Jimmy. He hit a baseball down the hill into a thick thatch growing around a thorny locust and Chris came at me when I pushed Jimmy down.
Chris was in Jr. High and I was in grade school. I stepped back and yelled at him, holding the bat out in my arm, “Get off my property.” I called them poor and Chris jumped onto my chest and pinned my arms down. He let one go to jab me in the ribs and I scratched at his face. He had beautiful eyes. “You’re a little asshole, Scott.” I screamed at my sister to run inside and call the cops as he laughed a dusty joke from his lungs.
We were more alike than I wanted to admit. We were like dogs. Young pups left too often alone and without training no outlet for their creative energy. Our energy was lower-class ferality like long plaqued teeth sinking into the necks of each other. Dogs like us needed a leader and in its absence our childhood turned into a play for dominance of the weaker ones.
Chris’s mother was the weakest pup of us all.
She came over to use the phone once when I was playing sick. She had curly black hair and manicured eyebrows. Quiet, pretty, young, younger than I am now, I was attracted to her weakness. She looked down. If ever I was going to have sex with an older woman. My own mother told me this story years after her family had vanished one day.
Several nights my mother was awoken by the screams of Chris’s mother. Her drunken boyfriend pounded and kicked at the front door and she cried “No, no, no.” Chris would get involved occasionally, “Leave her alone you fucker.” My mother laid there, her red cherry, like an antennae glowing in the dark. “If she ever screamed for help, I would’ve called the police, she never did.”
After I poured our piss into ice cube trays I went out and saw the greyhound that followed me home the previous day. She had a squirrel up a tree. She jogged up to me with the face of a half-wit—eyes wet, panting and sniffing with her bulbous black snout. Greyhounds, like me, have a terrible sense of direction so it was fantastic that we found each other. Crossing paths on any given day was like two blind men running into each other in a park at night.
Greyhounds have the biggest heart of all dogs. It enables them to fly after prey at 45 miles per hour. Maybe it was also that heart that came on me lost and crying on a dry sidewalk. Maybe she was sitting in her front yard and saw me and felt I was the most helpless of them all.
Greyhounds are pack oriented dogs. They need leaders too. In a brief day she had accepted me for that role, although I knew it couldn’t last for long. I tossed a tennis ball and she flew after it.
It was yellow day. The monarchs flittered in the milkweed around the air conditioner. Kansas sun, mostly unimpeded by shade trees, ricochets off concrete streets and sidewalks into the atmosphere, and eviscerates the blue from the sky until it turns milky and hurts the eye to even look up at it. The sky was the same color as Chris and Jimmy’s rental property.
Around noon, a friend came over and we went over to Chris’s house with our baseball bat and gloves. A leprous sycamore tree shaded their front yard and gravel drive way killing any chance for grass. Their mom sat on the front porch drinking tea with her neck arched and arms out behind her. I suggested we play in their front yard and took off my shirt.
The grey hound chased down the neon tennis ball and delivered them to me, sticking her long paws ahead, bowing; smiling.
Chris hit a ball high into the street and the grey hound followed it. She sprinted off like Eadweard Muybridge's Horse in Motion—all four feet off the ground at once. They came back down not quite at the same time. Her tongue hung out like she was daydreaming.
A Volvo doing about forty-five miles an hour in a thirty-five slammed into her long side. Its tires screeched, creating a surrogate for the empty space upon my tongue. The greyhound exploded on impact. Chris yelled, “And she’s out of here.” I recognized his laugh.
My white shirt lay wadded in the dirt in the front yard. Chris’s mother covered her eyes. Jimmy and my friend Joel stood like open canyons towards the accident and Chris rested his chin on the end of the bat laughing not so loudly, not so enjoyably.
“I got a dick as hard as Superman’s elbow.” Chris said, shaking off the rest and letting it pass.
Jimmy was cute poor kid--t-shirts too long and dirty. He had the brown eyes and cropped black hair of his kin. The two brothers were half-Mexican suburban rats who smoked cigarettes and got wet and knew how throw a punch. The day before we we’re knocking knotty crabapples into the creek behind our houses and I got pushy with Jimmy. He hit a baseball down the hill into a thick thatch growing around a thorny locust and Chris came at me when I pushed Jimmy down.
Chris was in Jr. High and I was in grade school. I stepped back and yelled at him, holding the bat out in my arm, “Get off my property.” I called them poor and Chris jumped onto my chest and pinned my arms down. He let one go to jab me in the ribs and I scratched at his face. He had beautiful eyes. “You’re a little asshole, Scott.” I screamed at my sister to run inside and call the cops as he laughed a dusty joke from his lungs.
We were more alike than I wanted to admit. We were like dogs. Young pups left too often alone and without training no outlet for their creative energy. Our energy was lower-class ferality like long plaqued teeth sinking into the necks of each other. Dogs like us needed a leader and in its absence our childhood turned into a play for dominance of the weaker ones.
Chris’s mother was the weakest pup of us all.
She came over to use the phone once when I was playing sick. She had curly black hair and manicured eyebrows. Quiet, pretty, young, younger than I am now, I was attracted to her weakness. She looked down. If ever I was going to have sex with an older woman. My own mother told me this story years after her family had vanished one day.
Several nights my mother was awoken by the screams of Chris’s mother. Her drunken boyfriend pounded and kicked at the front door and she cried “No, no, no.” Chris would get involved occasionally, “Leave her alone you fucker.” My mother laid there, her red cherry, like an antennae glowing in the dark. “If she ever screamed for help, I would’ve called the police, she never did.”
After I poured our piss into ice cube trays I went out and saw the greyhound that followed me home the previous day. She had a squirrel up a tree. She jogged up to me with the face of a half-wit—eyes wet, panting and sniffing with her bulbous black snout. Greyhounds, like me, have a terrible sense of direction so it was fantastic that we found each other. Crossing paths on any given day was like two blind men running into each other in a park at night.
Greyhounds have the biggest heart of all dogs. It enables them to fly after prey at 45 miles per hour. Maybe it was also that heart that came on me lost and crying on a dry sidewalk. Maybe she was sitting in her front yard and saw me and felt I was the most helpless of them all.
Greyhounds are pack oriented dogs. They need leaders too. In a brief day she had accepted me for that role, although I knew it couldn’t last for long. I tossed a tennis ball and she flew after it.
It was yellow day. The monarchs flittered in the milkweed around the air conditioner. Kansas sun, mostly unimpeded by shade trees, ricochets off concrete streets and sidewalks into the atmosphere, and eviscerates the blue from the sky until it turns milky and hurts the eye to even look up at it. The sky was the same color as Chris and Jimmy’s rental property.
Around noon, a friend came over and we went over to Chris’s house with our baseball bat and gloves. A leprous sycamore tree shaded their front yard and gravel drive way killing any chance for grass. Their mom sat on the front porch drinking tea with her neck arched and arms out behind her. I suggested we play in their front yard and took off my shirt.
The grey hound chased down the neon tennis ball and delivered them to me, sticking her long paws ahead, bowing; smiling.
Chris hit a ball high into the street and the grey hound followed it. She sprinted off like Eadweard Muybridge's Horse in Motion—all four feet off the ground at once. They came back down not quite at the same time. Her tongue hung out like she was daydreaming.
A Volvo doing about forty-five miles an hour in a thirty-five slammed into her long side. Its tires screeched, creating a surrogate for the empty space upon my tongue. The greyhound exploded on impact. Chris yelled, “And she’s out of here.” I recognized his laugh.
My white shirt lay wadded in the dirt in the front yard. Chris’s mother covered her eyes. Jimmy and my friend Joel stood like open canyons towards the accident and Chris rested his chin on the end of the bat laughing not so loudly, not so enjoyably.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Lil Sunday Morning Something sum.
One Robin will not let the other fly away
they trot, quick, tiny short,
slow
towards the cat
that should not be mistaken
for a crow
...
Bicycle pedals, whipering dogs on
in the leaves in the trees
tee-tee-tee-he-he
the red bishops cheep
thrushes chatter like smiling innocencents
who want to pet the dogs, Is he friendly...
odd gull or gooses on high
whistle babble brook
creatures so hollow they replace
one another
awaken before the dawn
the early wormers
miss us when us are gone
....
Magnolia
do not lose, pink and white graduation
fulough, an Easter sympathy card
do not lose
as long as you catch sugar and wine
in your folded hands
we will love
they trot, quick, tiny short,
slow
towards the cat
that should not be mistaken
for a crow
...
Bicycle pedals, whipering dogs on
in the leaves in the trees
tee-tee-tee-he-he
the red bishops cheep
thrushes chatter like smiling innocencents
who want to pet the dogs, Is he friendly...
odd gull or gooses on high
whistle babble brook
creatures so hollow they replace
one another
awaken before the dawn
the early wormers
miss us when us are gone
....
Magnolia
do not lose, pink and white graduation
fulough, an Easter sympathy card
do not lose
as long as you catch sugar and wine
in your folded hands
we will love
Monday, March 29, 2010
Public and Spoken Word
Silent reading was first documented by the venerable Saint Augustine in Confessions. A fourth century AD Father (Of course)-- Father Ambrose entertained Augustine so much with his non-speaking that it drove him to documentation, “…his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent, his tongue was still.” What a crazy notion. Silence. A goat-teed Ambrose, tea and cigarette, pondering, lips moving over Latin gold, finally slamming his calf-skinned novel shut extinguishing his tallow candle. But he was one of a few literates, maybe: http://thriceholy.net/literacyf.html
Orators and public plays had always captured the varied imaginations of peasants, nobles and aristocracy alike, as they do today, until Gutenberg’s 15th century movable type press was imbued with 19th century steam power and the flooding of the masses began, with pulpy Beadle dime novels of ill and consumptious repute. Public readings of prose continued as always, in salons and coffee shops and college campuses, but it will never regain its prominence as a viable source of entertainment and information.
That is why the readings which occurred on The University of Pittsburgh satellite location in Greensburg during the third week of March were an occasion for the celebration of spoken word. It is not an unpleasant experience to hear the sentences that many an hour have occupied in the author’s head. To hear the diction and timing of words broken from the source grants the imagery electricity. Let us not forget the act of showing up and sitting in a metal chair and how this interacts with the words, with author and audience. During Gerald Stern’s moving hour of poetry the rain poured night crawlers the size of squirrel intestines down upon the campus and a tornado siren whirred distantly. Who among the crowd would have not been ashamed to die that night during a reading of “The Dog” http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gerald_stern/poems/18058
or singed their shoelaces during the five minute fire alarm preceding Joseph Bathanti’s scathing reading of The High Heart.
It is down-right shame that spoken word, poem or prose, is not valued like stock in our society. That it is cornered off into small enough room. What I would pay to hear a public (and not a subscriber station- it is just not the same) radio station announce: “Coming up after the break a two-fer as John Cheever takes us swimming and Hemingway tells us about a Lion Hunt that goes all wrong. First, Laura with the hyperbole traffic report: ‘The end times are nigh, Chuck’.” Any day now, I am sure. (http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html)
At last, it is a good thing that people continue to try. That a professor named Lori Jakiela invites us to come along on her voyage to bring culture and experience to a suburban campus. To sit still and listen. To applaud and admire. To be.
--The author borrowed history notes from the incredible Reading Matters Book by Catherine S. Ross, et. al.
Orators and public plays had always captured the varied imaginations of peasants, nobles and aristocracy alike, as they do today, until Gutenberg’s 15th century movable type press was imbued with 19th century steam power and the flooding of the masses began, with pulpy Beadle dime novels of ill and consumptious repute. Public readings of prose continued as always, in salons and coffee shops and college campuses, but it will never regain its prominence as a viable source of entertainment and information.
That is why the readings which occurred on The University of Pittsburgh satellite location in Greensburg during the third week of March were an occasion for the celebration of spoken word. It is not an unpleasant experience to hear the sentences that many an hour have occupied in the author’s head. To hear the diction and timing of words broken from the source grants the imagery electricity. Let us not forget the act of showing up and sitting in a metal chair and how this interacts with the words, with author and audience. During Gerald Stern’s moving hour of poetry the rain poured night crawlers the size of squirrel intestines down upon the campus and a tornado siren whirred distantly. Who among the crowd would have not been ashamed to die that night during a reading of “The Dog” http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gerald_stern/poems/18058
or singed their shoelaces during the five minute fire alarm preceding Joseph Bathanti’s scathing reading of The High Heart.
It is down-right shame that spoken word, poem or prose, is not valued like stock in our society. That it is cornered off into small enough room. What I would pay to hear a public (and not a subscriber station- it is just not the same) radio station announce: “Coming up after the break a two-fer as John Cheever takes us swimming and Hemingway tells us about a Lion Hunt that goes all wrong. First, Laura with the hyperbole traffic report: ‘The end times are nigh, Chuck’.” Any day now, I am sure. (http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html)
At last, it is a good thing that people continue to try. That a professor named Lori Jakiela invites us to come along on her voyage to bring culture and experience to a suburban campus. To sit still and listen. To applaud and admire. To be.
--The author borrowed history notes from the incredible Reading Matters Book by Catherine S. Ross, et. al.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday night.
There is a canyon between the poets who teach and those who are taught. They speak to each other—the length is not unimaginable; they encourage one another tonight,--but the depth is unavoidable. The Professors: Blevens, Voelmer, Jakiela lay on the words as you hope a poet do. Good language like darning threads. They do not disappoint. The teachers paint while the learned write poems about paintings.
I see all the poets as I want to, at any age I chose, naked, at the height of some inspired thought: It does not matter. I close my eyes so I may hear them. The professors say, “Yes, I’ve been doing some time.” The others understand the things that can be taught. Technique, contrast, what is expected. What is poetry.
I am a hardened listener. Grandmother’s poem. There is no fucking way I can understand something like that after only hearing it once, but I listen. A little blonde punk girl says “Clit” and it is one of those words which sound so right. I like the short story about the cars, by the time the dialogue is finished I forgive him the clunky beginning.
The night reminds me of seeing live shows. The bad ones inspire as much as the goods ones do.
One last thing, young poet, like any good huckster, you should have timing: If you go over the limit with one too many poems you are exposing your hand. What is witty turns into routine and makes one think: “They’re all the same.”
I see all the poets as I want to, at any age I chose, naked, at the height of some inspired thought: It does not matter. I close my eyes so I may hear them. The professors say, “Yes, I’ve been doing some time.” The others understand the things that can be taught. Technique, contrast, what is expected. What is poetry.
I am a hardened listener. Grandmother’s poem. There is no fucking way I can understand something like that after only hearing it once, but I listen. A little blonde punk girl says “Clit” and it is one of those words which sound so right. I like the short story about the cars, by the time the dialogue is finished I forgive him the clunky beginning.
The night reminds me of seeing live shows. The bad ones inspire as much as the goods ones do.
One last thing, young poet, like any good huckster, you should have timing: If you go over the limit with one too many poems you are exposing your hand. What is witty turns into routine and makes one think: “They’re all the same.”
Saturday, March 20, 2010
For my Fallen Jayhawks
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me
Let me go, boys Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
This land was always ours
Was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others
Let them go, boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
Bury me at sea
Where no murdered ghost can haunt me
If I rock upon the waves
No corpse can lie upon me
Coming up threes, boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
So the angels won't receive me
Let me go, boys
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