goddammit look at
the crowd, tights and miniskirts,
girl jeans on bored boys - when
did the literary life get so popular?
flash art tattoos & pulitzer poets

1.
last best hope

"in this world there are only two tragedies: one is
not getting what one wants; the other is getting it"
- oscar wilde

solitary minutes roll into questionably
spent days, stacks of attic albums spinning
past the dust, refracting into twining tea
through last summer's unwashed jars,
intensifying touch me reveries as I pull off
another pair of ass-holed jeans. trying,
doing, trying, failing. keeping unmade
promises to pretty eyes and waiting for the
clouds to pass - for midnight runs and half
glimpses of Galatea. she: overwrought,
elusive; me: red-faced and inside out, on
two torn tendons like my achilles heel;
desperate from direction. assonance and
immolating clarity: a hurricane spinning
off the coast plays calypso riffs in
borrowed minor keys, inchoate and self-
aware. blushing, breathing heavy, i
empathize: exploding hearts and bloodied
lips, mixolydian to major chords on storm-
within-the-calm guitars. and in our wake -
the last best hopes, the first bright stars.


2.
so terrifying

blank pages as similes, like tattoos before
the ink: an ineffable pre-permanence; the
protracted jouissance of half-accidental
transgressions. three cups of coffee into the
afternoon and my amorphous heart's
expanding, filling arms and legs,
arrythmically beating from fingertips
into manual typewriters - "blank pages as
similes...." subway flirtations telescope
into ten year anniversaries, sidewalk
winks into overloud arguments in
neighborhood patisseries. and before,
when "love" slipped out, ignored - was
that a graveyard crow or lesbia's morning
sparrow?


3.
satori tuesdays

three bottles of champagne on a monday
afternoon; sustained shouts entraining
over the binaural beats of untunable
guitars, oral oscillations ringing from
tippled lips into transposed weekends -
popped corks and condom wrappers,
makeshift sutras for rock & roll buddhas;
early morning's half clarity. hours like
days beneath the broadway banyan, fat
psychic figs and incense sitll in unwashed
hair - the unraveled satori of the greasy
and contented, sacral flower wet on
sybaritic tongue; fruit wasps feeding at the
corners of fresh awakened eyes like the
easy tears of subtropical dictators: self-
loathing and deeply loved, magnanimous
and forever damned. the paralysis of
epiphany thrusting into brooklyn gardens
as frequencies align, building upon each
other into the enlightenment of vedic gang
covals and invincible pagan screams.


4.
storyville revisited

"i know you don't love me /
but i like the way you lie"
- lightnin' hopkins


crimped cavendish slow-soaked in sweet
liqueur, a bent neck pipe like that
borrowed alt sax; musty reads and
wanderlust (again). i navigated his nautical
dictionary from the lip of the tub to more
comfortable clines, only spilled a little
coffee. it's illegal to get a fish drunk in
oklahoma, i read, unsurprised; when lost at
sea, most birds are good to eat. these are the
facts i dream to deal in, poling down the
mississippi in low notes and tank-tops, en-
route to southern portmanteaux; pouring
bourbon into fresh caught perch with
knowing smile. third ward deejays in
uptown tuxes and tangelos from the corner
store, a girl from pittsburgh in my twelve
bar mind. lightnin' hopkins rolling wet on
whiskey lips, smoky voiced with mystic
raybans, tantric traveling past the mason
dixon into louisiana's low-cut jeans.


from mr. feathers flies again


5.
poetry of departures
post-apocalyptic part deux: the louisiana years


la nouvelle orlean: fait-le vous-meme, fist in the air.
easier said than done, she started in september &

the mold is spreading, spores across the northeast
buying out abita amber and smiling at strangers.

at a job interview i apply kristeva's melancholia,
& also lacan, to wayward sugar ray: "his psyche's

shattered, all of ours are... a mayoral musselmann,
America's fractured imago as advertised on CNN."

guattari would be so proud, a thousand points of
drunken light refracting dirty southern sensibilities,

cursing the federal government & jazz fusion.
stuffed merlitons & languorous dixieland; we're

expatriates in our own country, why go to paris?
it's just another arena of human frailties; i read

tropic of cancer & know what's up, plus you don't
speak french. my buddy's in maine, it's sinister;

"so depressing," says terrington in the confederacy,
wishing huey'd re-pave the roads one last time,

knowing, when the universe explodes apart, that
it'll be back with beer and'll need a place to park.


6.
bomb this bookfair


yusef kumenyakaa makes me cry
on the steps of the brooklyn court
house, borough hall, while phil
levine smiles along, de-troit tough -
a point from their poetic licenses,
one each, for emotional battery &
premature, too beautiful requiem
for a city that ain't dead; kiss some
other muse goodnight & close this
flooded casket; goddammit look at
the crowd, tights and miniskirts,
girl jeans on bored boys - when
did the literary life get so popular?
flash art tattoos & pulitzer poets
intoning themselves apart; i'm 
unlucky enough to catch yusef's
louisiana heart, tacky with jazz &
small town segregation. close the
casket, goddammit, and look the
fuck around; stop smiling, yusef,
satisfied stentorian, at lethargic
applause. there was a glitch in
this book fair's voir dire; someone
call a retrial, someone bomb this
book fair. give us something else
to clap about, morbid, eulogizing
ourselves with blood on the page.