Another apparently senseless thing I'm doing

I’m saving corks. One of the markets downtown collects them. “Recycles” them. Honestly, I didn’t know cork was endangered, but as soon as I found out, I began filling all available receptacles with them. I like to do my bit. I have flower vases in the cellar full of corks, cookie tins and plastic bags. I add about two or three corks a week to my collection. The problem being that I never seem to get around to taking them to the store. If God decides to flood the world again, and I understand this is not a ridiculous notion, I hope he chooses to let me know. I could build one badass cork ship.

bermuda triangle

Aside from narcolepsy, the only reason to stop on the highway is to use the bathroom. And the only decent highway rest stops are those with gas and restaurant emporiums. Such stops have trim, litter-free grounds and sparkling bathrooms with a middle-aged Eastern European lady who charges 50 cents per pee. I don’t begrudge the 50 cents, even per person, but I do dislike the 16 euros we end up spending on gummibears and Coke. So, although I hate them, I advocate the downgrade to the pull-off stop with picnic benches and toilets. This isn’t without its price. The company, for one, is way bad. The grounds are filthy and the bathrooms smell like a septic tank upchucked. This could be bearable if you look straight ahead and shallowly breathe. But you have to touch the door to the bathroom, the lock on the stall and you have to push the flush button (unless you are truly inconsiderate). This will compel you to wash your hands. If the faucet works you’ll have to touch it. There will be no soap in the dispenser. You’ll have to screw the dirty faucet knob back off and and then open the enormous bathroom door with the handle that all the people who haven’t washed their hands have pawed. You could use a paper towel as a glove but there won’t be any because the dispenser has been vandalized. You’ll want to wash your hands again. Before you know it you could be stuck.

sugarfist

I got my share of rejections over the past couple weeks and if you seem to be missing some, I got yours, too. But Whiskey Island accepted two poems that I was really happy about – “To Long Division,” and “Riding Backwards on the Train,” and RHINO recently accepted two of my home totem poems - “Steam” and “sPonge.” I've been in both journals once before, and they're terrific. That's RHINO's rhino that I've borrowed.

Elsewhere, Literary Bohemian also wrote to say they nominated my prose poem(s) “Attending the Tasting” for Best of the Net. Literary Bohemian is a beautiful and novel publication, so I was heartened. In a last bit of news, I have some fragments up in the new issue of Fraglit.

I’m counting down the days until the kids and I fly to Amerika for our annual family shindig. Today the number is 3!

Can't we put them all there

It had been a long time since I’d been to the ceiling.


poof

book as magic box

This is "Pandora's Box" by Su Blackwell, an artist who cuts sculptures out of books, making delicate, mysterious scenes. I can't help but think of Pandora herself, except instead of a box it's a book and what you find there is the product of your own mind. Check out her site. My favorites are the dark ones with light installed, but they're all extremely interesting. I'd love to wander into one.

so help me rhonda

I wrote a short piece on Mairéad Byrne’s offbeat book of prose poems “Talk Poetry” for ReadWritePoem today. I highly recommend the book, which is occasionally wild and often hilarious.

At the last minute I emailed to ask if RWP needed a photo of the poet. To my relief, the answer was no; they’d be using an image of the book. Personally I can be put off by poet photos, especially when it’s placed right next to a poem. It disturbs my reading. I’m easily influenced, and people often look confusingly different than what I want them to look like.

Here some famous writers, looking sensitive: Exhibit A, B, C, D, E.
(This is the interactive part - put them in order: Louise Glück, Ian McEwan, Lola Haskins, Schiller, Kathryn Harrison)

That said, I’m usually more than happy to provide a photo of myself if a publication asks. Maybe because I’m a cross between knock-out gorgeous and hillbilly fugly, and I’m amassing a middle-aged roll in my middle which never appears in the photo, and if there’s a camera around I either address it or avoid it, but don’t stand still and gaze longingly towards the horizon.

If you’d like to see a moving picture of Mairéad Byrne with a poem coming out of her mouth, click here.

serial comma

The neighbors all said he seemed like a nice enough guy. If you went by his yard when he was out mowing the lawn, sometimes he'd wave, or shout "hello!" or "have a good one!" But mostly he kept to himself. One lady remembered he came to a barbecue two summers ago, bringing with him a real nice layer cake.

They say I shot a man named Gray

Blue is widely accepted among men and is considered a masculine color. It is associated with stability and is the color most often chosen for corporate logos: Cobalt– Baby Blue – Cadet Blue – Blue Chip

Blue represents the sky, sea and all bodies of water, symbolizing depth and striving, faith, confidence and truth: Aquamarine – Sky Blue – Azure – True Blue – Sapphire

Blue is considered salubrious to body and soul. It slows down the metabolism and exudes calm. It is associated with serenity and spirituality, quietude and boredom: Cerulean – Pale Blue – Indigo – Pacific - Kansas Blue

While often used to connote health, blue also suggests psychological sadness and depression. It is also the color of illness affecting the respiratory tract and sinuses: Moody Blue – Chronic Blue – Fluesy Blue – Bell Bottom Blues

Blue is not tasty. Liquid, yes, but not juicy. Blue suppresses the appetite and should not be used to promote cooking and food. Blue sits at the right hand of God and that is why God created no blue foods. (For food, please refer to the chapter on deep reds and gold/brown.)

Blue is the color of trust and bonding, determination, strength and endurance: Steel Blue – Bondage Blue – Black-n-Blue – Backlash Blue – Blue Velvet

Blue is the color of drunkeness and stupor: Frost Blue – Vodka – Periwinkle – Nocturnal Blue

Blue is suited to promoting products relating to cleanliness and comfort, like cleaning fluids, air conditioners, spas and sparkling water: Turquoise – Blue Green – Ultramarine – Mineral Blue

Blue is the color of mystery and of sleep, both soft and profound: Powder Blue – Cornflower – Midnight Blue – Bluesuede Blue – Smoke

Blue is a conservative color and can represent jingoism and an inability to change: RedWhite& Blue – French Blue – RedWhite&Blue – Navy – RedWhite&Blue

On the color spectrum, blue epitomizes cold, especially as it approaches white: Arctic Blue – Bluelips Blue – Icicle – Blizzard Blue

Blue is the color of innocence: Alice Blue – Robin’s Egg Blue – Lapis – Faience

i've taken up with the shape of the grass

The new issue of Right Hand Pointing is out, which includes three short poems of mine: Library, What I Read in the Paper and Infidelity.

Welcome you reading!

1 of the 1,000 Pieces of Bullshit You May Have to Eat Before You Die

I was reading a wine column the other day and this guy wrote in for advice about a wine he found in his deceased uncle’s cellar, saying what year it was, which region, which grape and which vintner, and asking all worried like whether the wine expert thought it would be okay to drink. It sounded like he’d been pondering this for weeks if not months. The columnist replied with his well-considered opinion, as well as two book recommendations and some lore about the vineyard the wine came from. Jesus, I thought, what is wrong with you people? Yadda yadda.

Taste and see.

Death of the Marlboro Man

His wounds were sewn with smoke. His coma embraced the smell of suede and anise, cordwood, and all the stars stuck in tar. The prognosis was not good: one moment he’d look sound, the next he’d vaporize. The cowboys gathered round his bedside couldn’t know that just then he was having the sweetest dream; his stitches scarcely twitched to show it. Mist tangled the valley grasses. It nested in his beard and mustache; it permeated his pelt of hair, settling around him like ropes. Those old boys left the room, teary-eyed, switching off the overhead on the way out. From behind the curtain, the nurse spoke. “Let me tell you about my addiction,”she said, patting her book of matches, drying her hands on a side of beef.

Adverbsaries

Mr. Swayze was a balletically athletic actor who rose to stardom in the films “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost,” and whose battle with pancreatic cancer drew wide attention. – NYT

Balletically? Is this a word? I guess it is now. But it’s a goofy word and I promise not to use it. I’m sure the French won’t touch it either. I’m with them. What’s really sad about this supposed word is you are now forced to pronounce the /t/. Ballet. This is wrong.

Are you balletically inclined? Balletically oriented? Balletically pathetic?

I asked my colleague Geoff if balletically is a word. He assured me balletic is a word, but that balletically is not. I didn’t want to believe it, but Webster’s backs him up on both counts. Another online dictionary acknowledges balletically. Either way, I agree with Geoff when he says: “The question is not whether it’s a word. The question is whether or not the NYT can’t express it less awkwardly.” Thank you, Geoff. (Who then sheepishly added, “I guess he had the time of his life,” and ran off.)

It’s no surprise that words morph, and what was a noun is suddenly a verb (I knifed him) and vice-versa (That’s a miss), which then becomes an adjective (The poem is wordy), then the adjective becomes an adverb (just add -ly), or an adjective becomes a noun (My bad!) and so on. The surprising thing in terms of balletically is this usually happens at the vernacular level through the speech of ordinary people. Who are not often discussing ballet.

excerpted

of cummings

wild trump of April, sudden parody of snow,
currency of faint cities, dangerous looseness of doom,
thin despair of violin, undream of anaesthetized impersons,
measureless cool flames of making, early flowers of all things,
bulge and nuzzle of the sea, picker of buttercups,
subliminal fern of her delicious voice, rubbish of human rind,
soft adventure of undoom, frown of the grave great sensual knees,
tiny hinge of flesh, long flower of unchastity, lump of twilight,
cadence of our grey flesh, dooms of love, dooms of feel,
peaceful theorems of the flowers, god of everlasting war,
tree of jubilee, cheerfulest goddamned sonofabitch,
chuckling rubbish of pearl weed coral and stones,
treasure of tiniest world, time of daffodils(who know,
genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence, depths of guess,
cringing ecstacies of inexistence, whisper of a whisper,
strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,
sharp soft worms of spiraling, Big postmaster of the Art of Jigajag,
the top of notwithstanding, power of your intense fragility,
white eyes of elsewhere, dim deep sound of rain, broken odds of yes,
new england fragrance of pasture, lucky fifth of you,
virginal immediacy of precision, busted statues of your motheaten forum,
leaping greenly spirits of trees, nobel mercy of proportion,
all matterings of mind, echo of the flower of dreaming,
ghostly nevers of again, bliss of one small lady,
din of wallowing male, (children of)dirtpoor (popes

month of sundays

Saul Foarster is without a doubt one of the most important writers to emerge in the last decade. One of the most important writers working in English, I mean, in the decade that began in 2000. One of the most important writers in English in the decade that started in 2000 who is from the southwest. Specifically, from Mayes County, OK. Of the male writers from there. Hell, you can forget the “one of” – Foarster is the most important mustachioed male writer to emerge in the decade beginning in 2000 writing in English born on a Thursday in Mayes County, OK. In the science fiction genre, of course.

butta la pasta

In China I knew a guy who was a real foodie, meaning food was pretty much all he talked about. Somehow every conversation morphed into a monologue on broccoli, or parsley, or new things to do with peanut butter. Eventually people started cutting him off. You’d ask him what time it was and it was either breakfast or lunch time, or Peking duck season. I’m not one of those people who think cooking is a work of art, though it’s nice to have friends who do. Mostly I’d rather be doing something else. It’s a let-down to cook for 2-3 hours to have people finish eating in 10 minutes. Then the clean-up. To be honest, I’m not even that much into eating. But I do like looking at pictures of food in glossy cookbooks. It must be akin to what a teenage boy feels leafing through Playboy, and the objects of desire are just as unattainable. Mostly if I don’t have to feed anyone but myself I just take down the box of cornflakes and spread a handful out on the table. No bowl or anything, though I might wash it down with milk. From the carton. This saves doing dishes. I pick through the cornflakes, eating and browsing, searching for the jackpot piece that looks like Illinois.

I appear briefly on the balcony to curse the meadow

friday confession, on saturday

I really like the word dude. I know it reeks of creeps and is mostly a joke, and I never use it, but I think it is hysterical. I laugh just thinking about it. Sometimes when I'm down, I start pronouncing it all kinds of ways in my mind. I would like to use it aloud sometime, but I’m afraid. What if someone thought I was serious?! Sheesh, that would be that! Elsewhere, whenever I go to America I’m surprised how widespread the use of the word awesome is, at least among the under-40s, but also among some over-40s I know. I really don’t like the word awesome. I think it’s hyperbolic and kind of fake, like when you bite into a croissant and all these flakes go flying and you think, well, goodbye, I wasn’t destined to eat you. I guess it’s a generational thing. I have maybe once used awesome as a test. Which is more than I can say for dude. Other than that, I read something recently that said only middle-aged people (and older) use the expression “Jesus Christ!” I have to say I use that expression whenever I need it, but other than in movies I can’t recall any other living person saying it. I must be the oldest person left alive.

eavesdropsy

I was practicing my eavesdropping today. It started at the doctor’s office where I went to get my tick vaccination. I was waiting to give the assistant my insurance card but she was on the phone with a woman whose period was one day late. Apparently the woman had forgotten to take the pill every day and with her period one day late she wanted an immediate appointment and pregnancy examination. This must have been a young woman. I felt kind of bad for her having her problem broadcast all over the doctor’s office, but she was of course anonymous. The assistant didn’t exactly generate any warmth, either. She treated her like a dumb cow. Why doesn’t Germany have a higher suicide rate, I sometimes wonder.

My second attempt was on the train. There was a boy of about 9 telling a girl that his cousin had been shot, shot to death, he stressed. He was talking pretty low so I didn’t catch the whole thing and I’d already moved as close as possible without being obvious. But I did find out the two guys who killed the cousin escaped. I also found out that the cousin’s great-grandfather also died, but that he was 100 years old. I found this way of winding up of the conversation - the "light note" - very sophisticated for a 9-year old.

I'm doing this eavesdropping for a prompt over at Read Write Poem. Don’t know if I’ll get a poem out of it, though, despite the decent material.

superbia

Two funny brunettes have birthdays today: Lily Tomlin and my dog Stella!

Stella's all of four today. I got her a huge bone that took at least an hour to chew through, working alone and all.

I don't know what Lily Tomlin got - surely something else.

In any case, she couldn't have been as excited as Stella, who was happily exhausted when it was all over.

Stella occasionally turns up in a poem. Although she can be a pain in the ass, in poems she usually appears as a force for good. Here's one in which she's the main figure rather than a supporting actress.

the next to last straw

I was sick of being myself so I went to the museum to soak up the old masters. The ceilings were high, the light diffuse and the temperature-test machines were ticking. There was a wonderful Ernst Ludwig Kirchner I wanted to get close to, one of his Fränzi paintings. The problem was the digital cameras. It’s not like the days where someone was taking a picture and you’d politely wait until they got the shot before passing in front of their lens. No. Now everyone is taking a picture of everything. And people are not just doing goofy imitations of sculptures, they’re also taking 12 photos of their girlfriend next to Fränzi. Folks, I don't have time for all this acquisitive art-loving. In trying to save my soul by staying out of everyone’s schlock photo, by the time I went home I was more myself than ever before. So much for that.

Figure, Disfiguring

The candle began as a simple tool, just wick and molded wax, but soon morphed into the ultimate object of contemplation. Long after the electric light and back-up generator, the candle was at work with new purpose. People saw themselves in the flame, the even burn that quickly turned to thrash and panic, the wax relinquishing its form, the good posture collapsing, sloughing off and going cold. Up sprouted candle shops, beeswax farmers, candle match makers, votives, floaters, tea lights, candelabras and menorahs. There were candles for birthdays and candles for the dead. There were candle-making kits for kids, candlelight dinners and Candlelight Drive in Glastonbury, CT. Everyone knows the fascination of fire, but it was more than that. It was a body, the supposedly sole abode, taking itself apart, a controlled experiment in transformation, self-contained, solid to liquid, and back again.

Lieber Vlad,

Our Siberian aupair’s year is up. It doesn’t matter: we tied him up in the attic and are keeping him as a slave. Just kidding. He’s bigger than all of us put together. Good old Dmitry. He’s still living with us, doing the Tuesday baked noodle dinner, dog-walking and channel-surfing while looking for a job that will help him avoid the suicidal Russian army. The first thing Dima needs is some money. So what’s the first thing he does? He signs up for exclusive membership at the local fitness club. 70 euros a month. No exit. He tried to explain that he has no income and his visa status is shaky so that free 2-month membership trial shouldn’t have been automatically extended. They didn’t care, just showed him his signature on the contract. I wonder if mandatory fitness club membership is a legitimate reason to be exempt from Russian military service. I could write to Mr. Putin and say Dima is a “required member” at the club. The Russian army is mean but these fitness club instructors are pretty heartless themselves.

cutlery

the spoon in the knife drawer
with its face punched in.

honey pie

I was writing a poem recently about pain, and the weird similes we reach for in trying to describe it. It didn’t go far because of my penchant for the gruesome. Nevertheless, I got wind of this book The Body in Pain, which I've just started reading. One of the first things the author notes is how we’re largely unable to describe pain without expressions like “as if” or “as though.” There are some adjectives used frequently, such as “searing,” “burning” or “throbbing,” but often we resort to constructions like “It was as though someone stuck a knife in my side and twisted it,” or “It was as if my head were in a vice.”

The Body in Pain also mentions pain scales used by doctors, the most famous being the McGill Index. But I found another related to insect bites from an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt, which is vivid and whimsical. He rates the pain from insect bites from 1-4, 4 being the worst. It makes you almost want to get bitten. Here it is:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

unfortunate rhymes

sun - fun!
debt - regret.
together - forever

kitsch inventory

- a heart fashioned from a hay with a wooden cutting board plunked down in its center and hung on the wall
- sticks bundled with a bow and hung on the wall
- a collection of beer steins with images of German cities
- silk flowers, with a pronounced proclivity for the sunflower
- an enormous silk sunflower in a floor vase on my husband’s side of the bed that we didn’t notice until I set about making this list
- milk jugs painted with farm scenes (surprise!)
- a mirror framed with ceramic cherubin
- the mandatory regional bank calendar boasting local nature scenes
- hay clustered in the shape of a boy with a burlap cape and hat, hung on the wall
- a mini-sled atop the refrigerator with a hay bale as passenger
- (they really dig hay. as andy warhol said, “This is a tomato soup can; we have to make do with what we have,” or something like that.)
- plywood cutouts in the shape of a teapot and cups, painted blue and white and plonked on the wall
- you’ll find it hard to believe, but another hay heart with a long tail as if to mimic a rug beater, hung on the wall

I shouldn’t be critical, but there was hardly any place to put our stuff down because of the kitsch. And, if forced to choose, I’d choose farm kitsch over the driftwood, lobster shells and bird shit of maritime kitsch any day. Anyway, we had a great time in the Black Forest, which is surprisingly sunny.

maraschino

I am vacationing between the layers of a dark chocolate cake.

yes, we camp

Please check out this very nice review of my chapbook at Rattle!

you have been named chairman of the board

Oh! My "Monopoly Tokens" is also up at Juked today.
thanks, juked

Hotel Hoodwink

Camroc Press was kind enough to take one of my poems. Red Cap is up today, a poem inspired by Red Riding Hood. Anyone familiar with fairy tales and psychoanalysis knows this is one screwed up story, and that's its whole allure - that flashy cape as prey to carnal urges, the forest itself the sexual psyche.

Speaking of badass forests, we're off on vacation as of Saturday to Germany's Black Forest. It's actually a kind of save-$ vacation since we usually spend a fortune on gas driving to the Alps, or take a plane somewhere. This'll only be 3 hours away, and without a view of the Mediterranean. Suits me. I don't think there will be any wolves there.

If you'd like to see a version of Red Riding Hood that includes a ferocious wolf, check out this one.

gentle reader

Dear probably-otherwise-nice Man who lectured me about people who don’t clean up after their dogs while I was walking my dog in a very clean fashion,

Dear Murderer who had a difficult childhood about which I am sorry,

Dear upright German Lady who reminded me of the rules of the road while I was riding my bike slowly on a dirt path in the middle of nowhere without another bike in sight,

Dear Decent Writer who is otherwise somewhat of an egoistic foot-in-the-mouth kind of timesuck,

Dear I-bet-the-west-is-wrong-about-you Iranian President,

Dear must-not-get-enough-attention teenage boy who insists on playing his music for everyone in the subway despite being asked politely to turn it off,

wino haiku

scorching day
the corner winos
switch to white

tabernacle

Like most people, sometimes in solitude I talk to myself.
Sometimes it’s something significant like “I’ll never do that again.”
Or other times it's a revelation like “No time!”
It could be coupled with a grand gesture, or just shaking my head.
I do think mostly all this is not “talking” as much as “remarking,”
although I do sometimes ask myself an important question:
“Do I want to eat the rest of this?”
Sometimes I’m just looking for a little companionship.
I say to myself, “It’s raining pretty hard out here.”
And I answer, “You are right.”

First Lines of Favorite Novels

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. (Daniel Deronda by George Eliot)

It was a pleasure to burn. (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. (The Book of Laughter and Fogetting by Milan Kundera)

Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. (The Bell by Iris Murdoch)

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. (The Lover by Marguerite Duras)

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. (The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien)

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami)

In the town there are two mutes and they are always together. (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers)

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. (Waiting by Ha Jin)

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. (A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole)

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. (White Noise by Don DeLillo)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on a washday. (The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald)

This movie I’ve been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion. (Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates)

please feel free to chime in...

hey bulldog

I’ve got two poems up in the new Scapegoat Review: No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water. “Welcome you enjoy!” as we used to say in China.

Alongside a couple other diversions, I’m reading Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori, a collection of five short stories from the point of view of the same man in eastern Europe between the wars.

The gulf between Jews and “goyim” is clear in the first story. You encounter Jews as lice-ridden children, but also as bold intellectuals in the person of a young devil-may-care pianist. I’m into the second story now. The narrator does talk about Jews and he himself incorporates the negative attitudes towards them, but this doesn’t quite consume the book, and you don’t hate him for his hate, really; he is self-aware and intelligent. He is an anti-semite but not in a rabid way. Still, in the book, what you can assume is a ubiquitous repulsion is about to turn the world upside down.

It’s one of those books that I remember having in my bookbag and I’m not terribly drawn to it, but once I start reading again, it’s very engaging. It’s not a compulsive read, but worthwhile and evocative.

I still have a four books from my challenge to read this year, and of those I plan to get to the Jim Shepard stories and Butcher’s Crossing this summer.

Thanks to Kavel Rafferty for the Saucy image.

both sides now

You know the repulsion that stuns you when you take a sip of some drink you think is going to be something else?

You expect coke and get milk?
You anticipate milk and you get white wine?

It goes beyond disappointed expectations; it’s not just taste but texture.

Isn’t it somehow like drinking the expected and the unexpected beverage mixed together? A sudden fluid pollution, as if you’ve poisoned yourself?

George

lived in a town
where everything was an absolute riot.

A funeral’d go by and George’d say
Heh heh did I ever tell you about the time

Heh heh
Heh heh heh heh

your lordship's leather sandals

The best thing about school vacation is there’s no school! There’s no homework. No forcing people into bed right this minute, and back out in the morning like strips of bacon. There’s no math test or Latin vocabulary. No long-assed parents’ night. No has everybody got lunch money? No piano lessons or gym clothes. It’s as if part of my superego has gone to sleep, or is off jet-skiing in the Caribbean. I get up in the morning and close the shades so no one will wake up!

the pain in my side helping me forget the pain in my teeth

I got a rejection from a big name journal a couple weeks back. I wouldn’t even mention it since it’s not a surprise that I’d get a rejection from a big name journal, but aforesaid big name journal actually solicited poems from me, and then turned them down, making for a very sumptuous session of humiliation.

Oh well. I hadn’t submitted anything in ages, but over the past three weeks or so I sent out a number of poems so that, aside from aforementioned big name humiliating journal, I got some acceptances, too.

First, Barn Owl Review took a poem called Unseen for its 3rd issue, which I’m really happy about, both because of the poem and the journal.

Then Juked’s poetry editor came back from vacation and took two more poems from my last submission, a poem called Despair and my little series on Monopoly Tokens, a couple of which have appeared here.

My poet friend Robert MacDonald has told me he stalks out my publications and then submits to the same journals (with great results) and now I’ve turned tables by submitting to Apparatus Magazine. They took two poems and a fiction piece called Tinder Box, which I'd submitted as a poem. The editor thought differently. I said I didn’t care how it was categorized. Check out Robert’s poem in the premiere issue.

Finally the very exciting Scapegoat Review took two poems for its next issue, expected up this month – No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water.

So, in the scheme of things, I should come out positive, and thanks to daydreams in which I'm smoking cigarettes and drinking port in Lisbon in the body of a 23-year old man, I do.

& this cartoon made me laugh today.

& thanks to DoubleParlour for the illustration!

Please Remove My Name

Downtown there’s a man who will write
my name on a grain of rice for 5 euros.
I’m sure he’s a decent man who could use
5 euros, but what would I want with that?
Please remove my name from all grains of rice.
I write my name on the dirt in the eaves.

instruments of torture

Daniel Pennac’s 10 Inalienable Rights of the Reader:
You have
1. the right to not read,
2. the right to skip pages,
3. the right to not finish,
4. the right to reread,
5. the right to read anything,
6. the right to mistake a book for real life,
7. the right to read anywhere,
8. the right to dip in and browse,
9. the right to read out-loud, and
10. the right to be silent and not defend your tastes.

the sky today

When I was four or five I was standing in our gravel driveway on Marlboro Ave. The sun was shining like a good example and at the same time it began to rain, but only on half of the driveway. My mother said this was a called a sunshower. And I said, ok, now I’ve seen it all.

lice

I should be sipping chardonnay with you,
watching the candlewax build its limestone quarry.
But I itch all over.

It’s hard to be inhibited when a belittling affliction
salts the wounded scalp like some medieval torture.

I get more primitive by the minute.
Mmmm, to scratch is natural.

Will you squat behind me, apeman,
and ogle my follicles?

As god is my nightlite

I’m reading Manhunt, a book about the chase and capture of John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after the Lincoln assassination and attempted murder of Sec’y of State Seward. Even those without a special interest in Lincoln would enjoy this book. The beginning, especially, is so compelling that I had to talk to myself to keep from yelling and protesting. Even though you know the outcome, there is Booth climbing the stairs in Ford’s Theater, and it’s almost as if you could prevent what’s about to happen. Very exciting book and picture of the bygone.

Photo by Thomas Allen, a man who likes to conjure the characters out of the books by cutting them loose from the covers.

car keys to moderation

some die of heartbreak
some die of loneliness
some die of an overdose
everything you die of is an overdose
an overdose of tuberculosis
an overdose of choking
an overdose of ocean
an overdose of accident
none of this is the least bit funny
said the man who died laughing