Charles Bukowski, Sifting
through the Madness for
the Word, the Line, the Way
Ecco Press, NY.

"red dogs in green hell, what is this
divided thing I call
myself?

...

it's so easy to slide
into poetic pretension"

Old Chinaskis never die
they fake their deaths and write from L.A.
producing piles of posthumous confusion
bunkerbusting images
of racetrack rutting drunken scumdays
& California wino hard drives

stunning shifts in expectations
fucking poems fucking ending:

"the albatross is a fake,
the universe is a shoe,
there are no heroes,
there is only a mouse
in the corner
blinking its eyes,
there is only a corner
with a blinking mouse,
two roads embrace
what's left of the sun
as the monkey
manages a tired
smile."

the dagger twists
(jab, jab, jab)
from the wrists of Mt. Olympus
advising boring budding bards:

"the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in
you."

which is a far cry from
fat whores taking
big beershits
hemorrhoids
etc.

Skip Fox, What Of
Potes and Poets Press
Bedford, MA.
http://potespoets.org

Shudders of Tarantula
Lautreamont on crystal meth
this jumbalaya of bananal leaves
and synerjism sings:

"a pound of ground round grinding down the fairway...
the breaking of forms into norms for undertaking"
as 'pulsing meadows' merge with 'Malice
of Forethought' 'Witless in Gaza'
like 'slices of death through fissures'
of Fox's lite ironic water

if music and math ever met in vinaigrette
these vignettes are the new fast bastards
of a hyper-Olsonic
Ameridada

(see?

Arthur Rimbaud, From Absinthe
to Abyssinia: Selected Miscellaneous,
Obscure and Previously Untranslated
Works of Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud,
Mark Spitzer, trans. Creative Arts
Berkeley.

Merde! Merde! Merde!
the world would be better off
if Mr Spitzer translated himself
into shutting up rather than adding
to a pack of distorted
bandwagon lies.

Who cares about the prose Rimbaud
wrote as a trader of slaves in the bush?
Who gives a flying flatulence
for prepubescent Latin crap
and reconstructed
little ditties?

Girlfriend,
enough was enough
thirty years in the past
so spend yr green on something new
like a dble-sided dildo thong

and leave the deranging
to Fowlie & Varese
avoid exquisite
nepotism.