shine out in the wild kindness


Gibby Haynes, Revelation, unknown

Poems by Richard Brautigan:

To England

There are no postage stamps that send letters
back to England three centuries ago,
no postage stamps that make letters
travel back until the grave hasn't been dug yet,
and John Donne stands looking out the window,
it is just beginning to rain this April morning,
and the birds are falling into the trees
like chess pieces into an unplayed game,
and John Donne sees the postman coming up the street,
the postman walks very carefully because his cane
is made of glass.


Information

Any thought that I have right now
isn’t worth a shit because I’m totally
fucked up.


It's Time to Train Yourself

It’s time to train yourself
to sleep alone again
and it’s so fucking hard.


Lint

I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

How much fun is a lot more fun


Jonathan Blum, Will It Be OK?, 2007


* From a 1998 interview of Charles Simic. excerpt:

J.M. Spalding: Could you talk about your early years and your life before you realized you were a poet?

Charles Simic: Germans and the Allies took turns dropping bombs on my head while I played with my collection of lead soldiers on the floor. I would go boom, boom, and then they would go boom, boom. Even after the war was over, I went on playing war. My imitation of a heavy machine gun was famous in my neighborhood in Belgrade.

Spalding: When did you first feel what Pound called "the impulse" to write?

Simic: When I noticed in high school that one of my friends was attracting the best-looking girls by writing them sappy love poems.
...
Spalding: Who are your influences?

Simic: The way Don Juan adored different kind of women I adored different kind of poets. I went to bed, so to speak, with ancient Chinese, old Romans, French Symbolists, and American Modernists individually and in groups. I was so promiscuous. I'd be lying if I pretended that I had just one great love.

Spalding: If you had not become a poet, what would you have done?

Simic: I would have liked to own a small restaurant and do my own cooking. The dishes I like are mostly Mediterranean, so you'd have been served squid, octopus, lamb sausages, eggplant, olives, anchovies.... I'd hire my poet friends to be waiters. Mark Strand would look great in a white jacket wiping with a napkin the dust on some wine bottle of noble vintage.
...
Spalding: Where do you find your inspiration these days?

Simic: Piece of cake. One needs inspiration to write when one is twenty. At the age of sixty, there's the mess of one's entire life and little time remaining to worry about.

* Strange Victory. Check it out.

* "A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do." --W. H. Auden

Who can say where we're going
No care in the world
Maybe I'm learning
Why the sea on the tide
Has no way of turning


Mary Chiaramonte, Love + Hate, 2007


Xmas Gift
-- by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

I met Einstein in a dream
Springtime on Princeton lawn grass
I kneeled down & kissed his young thumb
like a ruddy pope
his face fresh broad cheeked rosy
"I invented a universe separate,
something like a Virgin"--
"Yes, the creature gives birth to itself,"
I quoted from Mescaline
We sat down open air universal summer
to eat lunch, professors' wives
at the Tennis Court Club,
our meeting eternal, as expected,
my gesture to kiss his fist
unexpectedly saintly
considering the Atom Bomb I didn't mention.


What We Want
-- by Linda Pastan

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.


Me & My Devo Hair
-- by Jennifer L. Knox

laid on the chaise together and yearned hard
for a new car (among other stuff) while listening
to Herb Alpert as our club-footed seizure shuffled
up the patio stones. I’d killed many men (among
other stuff) but the twisted thing outside the sliding door
would not die—despite all the times I'd napalmed its
luminous lair which ruined loads of mohair sweaters
(among other stuff) and gave me headaches—such doozies—
they hosed the chalk outline of my skull off the sidewalk.
Then suddenly: large relief to not be Aztec (or was I?)
broke like Burmese rain. I wasn’t that bad. We toasted,
“Here’s to being waterproof.”

I walk through the heather
Underneath the sky
The leaves have never looked as good
As now they're going to die


T. V. Santhosh, Bitter Lessons II, 2009

* Can you believe it? The Redskin's vendors are selling beer in the men's room at FedEx Field. excerpt:

"But then last weekend, the same guy who posted the shot a year ago put a video of FedExField’s head hawkers on YouTube. Commenters again chimed in to say they’d seen such sales at various men’s rooms during Skins home games. After Washington City Paper wrote about the clip, it went viral, so to speak. The bathroom beer vending gave the world another reason to mock the Redskins.

"Even folks who regulate beer sales for a living were shocked and awed by what they saw.

“'Our phones were ringing off the hook last week,' says Norma Lindsay, the chief liquor inspector for Prince George’s County. 'Everybody—us, the [county] health department, everybody—got involved. That sort of conduct is absolutely against code, because it’s a health issue. There’s every sort of health inspector in the world at that stadium for Redskins games, but nobody had ever heard of that or witnessed it before. I can’t even imagine who would want to buy a beer in the bathroom. That was frightening.'

“'Oh, my lord,' gasped Jill Pepper of the TEAM Coalition as she watched the video of the bathroom beer sales for the first time.

"Stadium beer is Pepper’s bailiwick. The TEAM Coalition is a local nonprofit that, Pepper says, was formed 'to promote responsible consumption and sales service of alcohol' at major sporting venues.
...
“'A bathroom can be hazardous to your health,' she says, “particularly as guys, since the track record for guys is, after they urinate, they’re quite disinclined to wash their hands. You pick up things from all over in the bathroom. When they hear this, some guys say, ‘I don’t think my hands are contaminated.’ Well, they might not be picking anything up from the act of urinating, but you may be carrying around bacteria and viruses from other sources. Even without the science, frankly, I’m surprised anybody would be considering mixing any type of food or beverage with the bathroom setting.'

"The Redskins were not sanctioned by P.G. County for the bathroom beer sales. Lindsay says she’s confident that the men’s room vending is in the past at FedExField. Her agency has been in contact with the team and its caterers since the story broke, she says, and they’ve assured her that the salesman in the video has been fired. But, she adds, just in case, county health and liquor inspectors have all been briefed on the situation, and from now on they’ll all be spending more time in men’s rooms.

“'We’re used to dealing with sales to minors, selling after closing time, sales on Sundays,' Lindsay says. 'Nobody ever thought of looking in the men’s room for beer sales. That one’s going down in the books.'"

* Falsedawn!

* "The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment." -- Dorothy Nevill

all I want in life is a little love
to take the pain away


Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1943

Progress Report
-- by Leonard Nathan

The trees won't talk; but we've got instruments
To get the truth. Old omens of the air
Mean birds are hungry, here as everywhere,
And speak, if forced to, in present tense.
This took eternity and some expense
To verify. Gods, never really there,
Reduce to heros dying for a share
In prospects disconnected and immense.

Symbols, like homespun drugs, were handy things,
But facts are good as guns. And then there's you --
No priestess circled by sacramental wings
From Cythea, but a girl well suited to the act;
And what's to be done with nature? Nothing new.
We'll dream in symbols, wake up in cold fact.


Gravity
-- by Louis Jenkins

It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to
nothing and water just runs right onto the ground in the
crawl space underneath the house and then trickles out
into the stream that passes through the backyard. It turns
out that the house is not really attached to the ground but
sits atop a few loose concrete blocks all held in place by
gravity, which, as I understand it, means "seriousness." Well,
this is serious enough. If you look into it further you will
discover that the water is not attached to anything either
and that perhaps the rocks and the trees are not all that
firmly in place. The world is a stage. But don't try to move
anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for
the stagehands and union rules are strict. You are merely a
player about to deliver a soliloquy on the septic system to a
couple dozen popple trees and a patch of pale blue sky.


Untitled
-- by Grace Paley

Life is as risky
as it is branchy

treetop and twigtip
are only the beginning

then comes the westwind to lean
and the northwind to turn

then the sunshine implores
and up all of us go

we are like any
greengrowing machinery

riding the daylight route
to darkness

i like to stay home
and play guitar
and play it back


Arthur Trees, Masked Children 110th Street, New York, 1969

* From Harper's November 2009:

-- Last year in which the unemployment rate in what is now Silicon Valley was as high as today: 1949

-- Percentage of fish sampled from 291 U.S. streams for a recent study that were found to be contaminated with mercury: 100

-- Percentage change during the past year in U.S. sales of Wild Turkey specialty bourbons: 88

-- Number of Indian headdresses that could be made from the feathers of all U.S. turkeys eaten at Thanksgiving: 43,212,000

-- Estimate length of human nose removed by U.S. plastic surgeons each year, in feet: 5,469

-- Factor by which this exceeds the length of George Washington's nose on Mount Rushmore: 260

* Ha!

* "I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." -- Dizzy Gillespie

In the waking hours of some not too distant morning
you come walking barefoot to this cowl pulled mind
selling yesterday's dreams wrapped in tomorrow's paper
whistling for a dog named kindness that you'll never find


Rob Sparrow Jones, Hardly Any Tiger Live in a Tree, 2009

Clean, clean, clean
-- by Linh Dinh

Belonging to the lower class, you’re expected
To cater to the upper class’ lower bodily functions,
Not to engage their minds but to wipe their asses,
Kiss their cunts on demand, suck cocks for tips,
Unless, of course, you’re an artist, in which case,
You’re an aristocrat of the servant class, to quote
That grand maestro among slaves, Jasper Johns.

I used to clean apartments and houses.
Showing up for a new job, I was greeted
By the mistress, “I have the most respect
For new immigrants. You work so hard!”
Down low, you’ll get a disproportionate
Low down on all things funky and nasty,
Nothing unusual, really, just shit and stuff.

I cleaned toilets and fridges, folded panties,
Got on all fours, dipped into the suspicious.
A young woman confided, “I moved to Philly
Because California women were so beautiful.”
She was usually home when I came. The spine
Of her soft porn book turned to the wall. They all
Had some smut in the house. This was before
The Internet made these sad and surreptitious
Purchases unnecessary. I found a teen-aged
Madonna in a closet, so I knelt and sighed.

A fat one lived alone, but once she said, “Sorry,
The house is so messy today. I had company
Last night,” and her face brightened angelically.

do not fret
the bus will get you there yet


Jenny Holzer, In a Dream

* Charles Bukowski, on writing on the computer (he started writing on a computer at ae 70):

"There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can't make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real. When this computer is in the shop and I go back to the electric, it's like trying to break rock with a hammer. Of course, the essence of writing is there but you have to wait on it, it doesn't leap from the gut as quickly, you begin to trail your thoughts -- your thoughts are ahead of your fingers which are trying to catch up. It causes a block of sorts indeed."

* Bravo.

* "There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes". -- Doctor Who

Sun shines
People forget
The spray flies, speedboat glides
People forget
Girls smile... people forget
The snow packs, the skier tracks
People forget
They forget they're hiding


Keith Sonnier, Motordom, 2005, Neon, Argon & Fluorescent Light

Lost Sonnet
-- by John Ashbery

They grow up too fast
these days. Unassumingness
becomes unwieldy, the woods
a place to walk from briskly.
You say your cunning comportment
is artless? Well then so am I
for containing you, champ.
Your tracks are alive with new interest.

The trail always sees what’s up ahead,
which is resistance. No tooth
or star contradicts what is made
and hard to screw up. Wash the guest’s
feet, the aviator. Jack was his name
and we were like brothers, though we never knew each other.


Me & My Devo Hair
-- by Jennifer L. Knox

laid on the chaise together and yearned hard
for a new car (among other stuff) while listening
to Herb Alpert as our club-footed seizure shuffled
up the patio stones. I’d killed many men (among
other stuff) but the twisted thing outside the sliding door
would not die—despite all the times I'd napalmed its
luminous lair which ruined loads of mohair sweaters
(among other stuff) and gave me headaches—such doozies—
they hosed the chalk outline of my skull off the sidewalk.
Then suddenly: large relief to not be Aztec (or was I?)
broke like Burmese rain. I wasn’t that bad. We toasted,
“Here’s to being waterproof.”


Sorry
-- by Eileen Myles

I can’t remember the 2nd
time I hurt you—

it was dark & someplace
in that darkness
was the thing I did.

You weren’t the target, I
know that, though
you might’ve been the bow
& the tension
I really think is love.
Nothing ever sends me away.
I’ve got your pain
in my pocket &
it glows in the dark

and in the light
it’s the softest kind
of singing woman’s voice.
That’s who you are. To me, I mean.
Let me hold your shoulders
back so you look
arrogant & beautiful
welcoming me into the warm
sad party. Let this
be the unfortunate hat
I hang outside the door
if only you will
allow me to come in.

I am not your map


Alfred Gescheidt, Untitled, 1964

Three for Tuesday:

-- Isolation, by John Lennon

-- Way Way Down, by Bill Fox

-- I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (live), by Warren Zevon

* "One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you." -- Larry Gelbart