from: triangulating happiness |
by Nicholas Courage |
|
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. |
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