1.
it's really very simple
i want to write another poem
but this one i want to write it about you & you
there was something very special sitting in the recreational vehicle
that we would all later laugh & yell & chant in
before all that i sat in the vehicle & quietly drank whiskey with jim
to 'calm' my 'nerves'
2.
i don't know how to make this poem a poem
i want it to hold things
like the drawer in the recreational vehicle that held my shoes
& i want things to get lost in this poem
like my shoes in the drawer of the recreational vehicle
that i forgot for a time
because i got so joyously drunk with you & you
& all the other yous who love you
3.
i don't really speak in crow
i'm nothing impressive
& i am certainly not a sphinx,
although i'd certainly like to be!
but since i'm not i can only write about kim
handing me a girl scout cookie with coconut in it
& how i ate it
& how i don't like coconut
but how i ate it & enjoyed it in the recreational vehicle
& later how i asked kim how old she is
& how she said, "guess"
& how i was very close
& how then she said,
"guess how many of these are in my hair"–
'these' being these things that were in her hair
to make it look a particular special way–
& how when i guessed that i wasn't close at all
4.
the pictures i took in the recreational vehicle
for them i used this 'gritty' black & white effect
that was created with i-don't-know-what in mind
but it was so bright in the recreational vehicle
it looked like we were in a recreational vehicle on the 'bright' side of the moon
like we were all nanoseconds from melting
melting into a pool of each other
i know this is all rather hokey
but i'm glad right now
that i can be hokey & smile when i'm alone
writing this poem has been a bright spot
in a rather dark night for me
so it is nice to write about brightness in such a hokey way
5.
one of my favorite lines that i have yet to use in a way that satisfies me is
'there is only greater or less heat'
once i paired that line with some lines from the lorrie moore story how to be an other woman
from her book self-help
so it went–
"it sounds dumb
it makes no sense
but it is how you meet
there is only greater or less heat"
& i quite like the pairing
even though it is not a perfect pairing
it is really a very odd pairing
but when a pairing occurs it is probably best
to just jam the pairing into the poem
& allow the pairing to live & breathe in the world you have created
it is a much better pairing than "live & breathe"–
which is a pairing that is equally predictable & boring
a pairing that i would cross out
if i had any sense at all
the church that you & you got married in
i know you know this but
i want to point it out
it shared a parking lot w/ a liquor store
another rather fantastic & imperfect pairing
the kind of pairing that
needs to be jammed into this poem
6.
it really isn't so simple
by it i don't mean this poem
but i mean waking up & walking through each day
until the day comes
that your days are through–
there's a story i want to tell
it involves a girl & a boy & a pregnancy–
such stories tend to envelope a wide cast of characters & settings–
& by characters i mean real people
& by settings i mean homes & bars that real people cry & vomit in
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
A BLOG POST ABOUT AN UNFINISHED POEM
I have many unfinished poems. This is a blog post about one of them.
Once upon a time I wrote a poem called KIDNEY LUST. How it happened was pretty simple. I wrote a bunch of short attempts at poems titled KIDNEY LUST. I was hoping that if I kept writing poems called KIDNEY LUST eventually I would write a poem called KIDNEY LUST that I liked. After awhile, that never worked, so I had all these poems that I didn't like. So I don't remember why I did this, I'd probably fucked around with methods this before to a lesser extent, but what I did was I took every line in all of the short attempts at poems titled KIDNEY LUST and wrote them down separately, so it was like I had a deck of cards of lines, then I started going through them randomly and typing them in the order they came out, and I did this for like an hour. So then, I had this gigantic thing that was a new attempt at writing a poem titled KIDNEY LUST. Then I read it and quickly edited it and then I had finished a poem I liked, titled KIDNEY LUST. That was basically how it happened.
After I wrote that poem I started writing more poems using that method, and it wasn't long before I was infatuated with the method. Then I started tinkering with the method, and what ended up happening is I was only interested in writing lines, and then constructing ways of putting them together that were to some extent beyond my control. I wrote a lot of poems this way.
Then I had a new idea. I would write fourteen sets of ten lines and then use those lines to construct fourteen sonnets. The idea was to develop a way to write sonnet sequences. I didn't get very far, not a single sonnet emerged from this. Not a single poem, just these lines, which are in a sense an unfinished poem. Here are the lines.
1
1. generally i think about things the way a rabbit living in a stoop thinks about things.
2. garbanzo beans, cook the garbanzo beans.
3. then becky texted me, 'that wait can be a real bitch'
4. i can only name one famous literary whale.
5. it all started when we started facebook chatting about the 'buy a hooker & just talk' precedent
6. moldy garbage makes me cough
7. i sprayed bug spray on yr toes
8. mercury butter makes me fatter
9. i think yr brain is detached from your brain
10. diddling ain't happening.
2
1. later when i licked yr toes you laughed & said, 'stop, that feels weird' but i didn't immediately stop & that's when i got tongue cancer'
2. but one of the rabbits still bit yr toes
3. we cooked italian food for the first time
4. as a big space rock flew frictionlessly through space
5. adolf hitler couldn't draw a toe to save his life
6. i've written more words on the internet than most prolific authors have in print
7. the first love story i wrote was about an island made of mud
8. when i think about yr tits i lick things.
9. then i did a joke 'a guy walks into a bar with a gun'
10. i like to joke how shooting heroin makes me cum.
[I just remembered a detail about the process. The first set of ten lines, I just randomly wrote lines that were interesting to me. I remember writing these lines in Noodles & Company on 72nd and Dodge Street. The second set of lines all 'followed' a line I chose from the first set of lines, and the line I chose from the first set of lines to have all the lines in the second set of lines follow from was the line 'i sprayed bug spray on yr toes'. Throughout the process I continued choosing one line from the previous set that all the lines from the next set would follow from. That way, when I was finished, with all the lines, I would have completed the first sonnet in the sonnet sequence, and the first sonnet would be less 'random' than the rest that would then emerge from the lines.]
[The line from the second set of lines that all the lines from the third set of lines followed from was the line 'as a big space rock flew frictionlessly through space'.]
3
1. the space rock driver liked to joke "next stop, montana" – people always said, "what is montana"
2. & at the center of the earth the descendants of the apocalypse cult with the best bomb shelter are having a quasi-incestual fuck fest
3. there aren't any bugs on the big space rock
4. it's funny how the term 'crash course' applies to .0000000000000000000000001% of the universe
5. our first fourth of july together you lit a firework called 'big space rock'
6. the scientist who invented the spork thought he would make something obsolete
7. a man on facebook told me there wasn't a room to masturbate in at his office.
8. shrimp sound good right now – we should eat shrimp.
9. i like/fear weird sensations in my heart.
10. i wish you knew yr biological family so you knew if yr biological family was littered with addicts.
[the line in the third set of lines that all the the lines from the fourth set of lines followed from was the line 'it's funny how the term 'crash course' applies to .0000000000000000000000001% of the universe']
4
1. girls/guys who are statisticians give the best blowjobs
2. wikipedia didn't know when the # of sequins on earth will surpass the # of grains of sand.
3. earlier this week i 'wrote a poem' while taking a walk cuz that's what wordsworth did except my poem was about a lotto billboard being struck by lightning
4. despite never traveling i'm quite good at packing a trunk
5. an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things
6. my shoulders are shaking
7. when i first set out to write a novel about oj simpson i had no idea that the tv would be the protagonist
8. i wish a robot had followed me my whole life – then i'd know the statistical variance between my sneezing without wearing bugspray & my sneezing with wearing bugspray.
9. i have to admit: i felt excited when i played catch with this girl last week
10. mostly i'm just frantically trying
[the line in the fourth set of lines that all the lines from the fifth set of lines followed from was the line 'an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things'.]
5
1. and the worst place to do no things
2. if it's filled with poison, bring your ant farm
3. did you get invited to too many or not enough pizza parties?
4. just imagine the time it takes george gervin to do a finger-roll is time.
5. i'm much less concerned by falling rock than running deer
6. to be quietly honest: i'm glad we told you about the fire
7. quote of the week: "be ready to suffer"
8. why take a nap?
9. after i called big easy a fat fuck there was a very special episode about big easy being a fat fuck
10. i made noises, then i said velvet, then i said velveeta, then i said verisimilitude, then i laughed
[the line from the fifth set of lines that all the lines from the sixth set of lines followed from was the line 'i made noises, then i said velvet, then i said velveeta, then i said verisimilitude, then i laughed'
6
1. then, yaknow, an orchard fell over. it was a movie set.
2. a portion of eyelashes are digested in stomach acid
3. oregon is the setting for my fake trip.
4. when we watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm someone wrote faggot on my white board.
5. would you mind if she clocked on & i clocked off & went outside?
6. renegotiate don't stop this train i try
7. we used to call them grenades & drink them in the back of a cadillac
8. orlando's the city i'd get my kids drunk in
9. what is a skirt when it's pulled up to yr tits
10. god it felt good when you looked that good
[none of the lines from the rest of the sets of lines followed from a specific line]
7
1. & i appreciate managerial accumin but the table of managers is being quite rude
2. todd said re: poets "i don't want to hear another fucking commercial" & i did a grin
3. ashley said re: poets "a trail of vowels" & i did a grin
4. kyle said re: poets "fucking sham poets" & i did a grin
5. think of putting a stone in a creek then fabricate
6. or when you orchestrated a tack ball into jordan z's rat tail
7. i erased it
8. how does it fuck a boy up to read esquire, watch pornography, & feel the need to complete drinks & lists & movies instead of, yaknow, fuck?
9. the clouds are PISSING ME OFF
10. try one of our delicious boneless blitz bundles.
8
1. i can't sleep
2. she was suddenly being incredible where she died.
3. once i wrote a line about how my shoes were cleaning up vomit earlier
4. you weren't at all friendly to me when i tried to be friendly to you at the bar
5. the only girl i've found on okcupid who is also looking only for friends is extremely attractive
6. like that swedish filmmaker, he used to be a poet
7. i just have canned material for when i meet people, i htink that's cool
8. i'm stormlipped, tired, & brewing
9. when carrie texted me "SHITbox" i smiled
10. really i am looking only for friends but i just want blowjobs too
9
1. the naked sound of a body smells like a trumpet.
2. it consists of caves and neither of them knew it.
3. i'll tell you a story to drink that hard liquor form the cold bitter cup.
4. the long walk down somebody's half-dream.
5. keep us warm while the night grows.
6. there is a mind beating in that pile of rubble
7. for you i would build a whole new universe.
8. i have seen your slips & came home sweating
9. surf, for christ's sake.
10. at least we both know how shitty the world is.
That was as far as I got. I wrote nine sets of ten lines. Then I stopped. From the idea that all the lines in one set would follow from one of the lines in the previous set, this fragment emerged:
Here is a part from my poem FAT PAUL NEWMAN:
Also while I was writing these lines, something else happened. What happened was my friend got dumped by his girlfriend, a girl who he had referred to as variations of "the girl I'm going to marry" and shit like that. This was also strange, and I thought that I should also write a poem sequence called DUMPGATE, which I also think is an awesome title for a poem sequence.
Now, titling poems gives them some direction that simply writing does not always have, so I had on my hands two incomplete poem sequences, one called XANAXGATE that was partially complete, and one called DUMPGATE that only existed as a title. What this means is I had a lot of work to do to finish these poem sequences. And what happened was, I never did it. I'm not sure why I never did it, but I have a few ideas.
The first idea is that the method, of randomizing lines and then turning the randomized mass into a poem sequence, is rather tedious. That is, it is much more tedious than simply writing. This possibly contributed to me never finishing either of these poems.
The second idea is that perhaps I started wanting to do 'too much' with these poems. It's one thing to want to write a poem, but here I wanted to write twenty-eight poems. That is a lot of poems. This surely contributed to me never finishing either of these poems.
The third idea is that I started writing something else, but I'm not sure what I started writing.
The tfourth idea is that I started writing somewhere else, as in in a different notebook, but I'm not sure which notebook I started writing in, or if I did that.
There are a lot more ideas but the point is I stopped this project for some dumb random reason, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it kind of bums me out a bit I guess.
Now, I have written a lot about this unfinished poem, which eventually became twenty-eight unfinished poems, but what I'm going to do next is go through every line in the nine sets of ten lines and try to remember the impetus for the line. Okay.
1.1. "generally i think about things the way a rabbit living in a stoop thinks about things." = this line refers to the stoop at my house, which rabbits used to live underneath and around, but no longer do, because the giant bushes near the stoop were removed by our landlords, i have written about rabbits with some frequency, surely this is only because i lived near and around rabbits for so long.
1.3. "then becky texted me, 'that wait can be a real bitch'" = this line refers to a time when i asked a friend of my to contact my ex-gf for me, and the friend eventually texted me the line quoted in this line, referring to how hard it is to wait for people you desperately want to talk to to want to talk to you also, or something.
1.4. "i can only name one famous literary whale." = this line refers to moby dick, i was thinking about moby dick when i wrote this line, but recently i wrote a line where i referred to moby dick and shamoo, and now that i think about it i think it is fair to consider shamoo a literary whale as well, it's funny that i'm still preoccupied with literary whales to some extent.
1.5. "it all started when we started facebook chatting about the 'buy a hooker & just talk' precedent" = this line refers to me and amanda talking about 'the catcher in the rye', which we talked about during one of our earlier facebook chats, if i recall, i'm not sure what i mean by 'it all started' or what 'it' is that 'started' but it seems possible that i was referring to my friendship with amanda.
1.10. "diddling ain't happening." = this line refers to the fact that i was not getting laid at the time, which was rather frustrating.
2.1. "later when i licked yr toes you laughed & said, 'stop, that feels weird' but i didn't immediately stop & that's when i got tongue cancer'" = this line refers to an instance that occurred many years before i wrote these lines when i was licking my first gf's toes and she thought it felt weird and asked me to stop but i didn't immediately stop, but i didn't get tongue cancer, haha.
2.5. "adolf hitler couldn't draw a toe to save his life" = in the self-help book 'the war of art' steven pressfield alludes to the fact that had hitler succeeded as an artist the holocaust perhaps may have been avoided, which is a strange and perhaps stupid thought but it stuck with me for some reason and i remember thinking about that part in the book when i was writing that line.
2.6. "i've written more words on the internet than most prolific authors have in print" = this line refers to all the posting i've done on message boards over the years, which for a long time i considered a waste of time but recently i have come to believe to be a part of my 'larger writing practice' and therefore not a waste of time but ultimately a very healthy 'work' that needed to be done for me to become much better at writing, i believe this line is an early instance of me beginning to recognize the fact that my massive amount of writing on message boards was of value to me, as opposed to a waste, that is, it was an instance of me looking to my past and feeling satisfied with how i spent my time, and it fills me with hope that i can eventually view all aspects of my past through a positive lense as opposed to one where i beat myself up about what i did or didn't do.
2.7. "the first love story i wrote was about an island made of mud" = this line refers to this thing i wrote, which i recently emailed to a friend of mine in an attempt to explain a lot of different things, it would take for fucking ever to go into it, all that matters is that was the 'story' i was referring to in this line.
2.10. "i like to joke how shooting heroin makes me cum." = this line refers to something i read once on a message board about how when you shoot heroin you cum in your pants, which was really funny to me at the time and i guess had somehow not occurred to me, but since i read it i have countlessly referred to heroin and how heroin makes you cum in yr pants when you shoot it up, including during our long drive to boise, wherein me and justin riffed 'endlessly' about the idea of using a line about cumming in yr pants in a poem, and since then justin has written a poem or two that alludes to cumming in yr pants as a result of injecting heroin, i'm not sure if i have successfully alluded to heroin/cumming in pants in a poem yet.
3.2. "& at the center of the earth the descendants of the apocalypse cult with the best bomb shelter are having a quasi-incestual fuck fest" = i believe this line refers to one of the matrix movies, i believe i was thinking of one of the matrix sequels while i wrote this line
3.5. "our first fourth of july together you lit a firework called 'big space rock'" = i was def thinking abt my first gf when i wrote this line, because she is the only gf i spent fourth of july w/, and i remember thinking abt that when i wrote this line, but there is no firework called 'big space rock'
3.7. "a man on facebook told me there wasn't a room to masturbate in at his office." = this line refers to a strange fb chat i had with a guy who i didn't know but had mutual friends w/ and so added on fb, who started talking to me abt how badly he wanted to masturbate but there was nowhere for him to masturbate at his office.
3.9. "i like/fear weird sensations in my heart." = this line refers to a subject i wrote abt countless times, which is before my healthfulness renaissance, this thing repeatedly happened where i'd be sitting around getting fucked up and my chest would feel tight, or strange, or like 'suddenly different', this was very frightening, and i was basically worried that i was going to have some sort of heart attack/stroke for two years or so, and i wrote abt it constantly.
4.2. "wikipedia didn't know when the # of sequins on earth will surpass the # of grains of sand." = when i was writing this line i was thinking abt this time i was in pe in 11th or 10th grade and it was just after prom and there were some sequins on the ground, and i picked one up and my friend who sat next to me in pe picked one up, and how it went is like, i was like, 'check this out i found a sequin', then he grabbed one and was like, 'pff who cares i found one too', and i was like, 'good point, stupid sequin', and threw my sequin on the ground, then he threw his sequin on the ground, then i grabbed both sequins, and he tried to play it off like i didn't fucking jedi mind trick him into losing his sequin, but i did, i think abt this often, and probably will for a long time, and i was thinking abt this when i wrote this line.
4.3. "earlier this week i 'wrote a poem' while taking a walk cuz that's what wordsworth did except my poem was about a lotto billboard being struck by lightning" = this line refers to this dumb poem i wrote while walking after having a conversation w/ kyle abt wordsworth.
4.5. "an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things" = when i wrote this line i was thinking abt this portion of a summer where the swimming pool in my home town was getting renovated so it wasn't filled with water and me and my friends would always sneak in and fuck around at the bottom of the swimming pool, it was fun and felt 'romantic' at the time, as it was happening i mean.
4.7. "when i first set out to write a novel about oj simpson i had no idea that the tv would be the protagonist" = i used to have this idea for a novel called 'be juice', i'm not really sure what it was going to be but i thought i could write a lot abt oj simpson and eventually have an experimental novel, i think i had two pages, they were really bad, or maybe they weren't but like it was all a farce, i was trying to tell myself that all i needed to create a massive text was a mildly interesting idea then the rest would just sort of follow from that, but this line was written before i had abandoned this 'be juice' idea and recognized it as worthless/fraudulent.
4.9. "i have to admit: i felt excited when i played catch with this girl last week" = this line refers to this time i was hanging out w/ some friends and this girl was w/ us, who was friends w/ one of my friends, and we went to some party and i almost got us kicked out by being insanely drunk, but eventually we came back to my house and started playing beer pong and i got this girl to come into my room and start giving me a blowjob, and it was a thing where i was like blacking out and don't really remember what happened but do remember getting head, anyways later that girl was over at the house and we were sitting on opposite couches while all these other motherfuckers were chatting or whatever and we started playing catch w/ this goofy toy football, and i felt excited because i felt like maybe that meant she liked me or something, but i don't think i've seen her since then, probably because i never got her number, wtf is wrong w/ me.
5.9. "after i called big easy a fat fuck there was a very special episode about big easy being a fat fuck" = this line refers to a brief stage in my life where i was consistently watching real world road rules challenge and making jokes abt how fat big easy was if anyone was in the room while i was watching it.
6.4. "when we watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm someone wrote faggot on my white board." = this line refers to the first valentine's day i ever spent w/ a girl, which i spent w/ my first gf before she was my first gf, and we ate burger king and later watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm room and probably made out for like 4 hours straight or something, and this dude, who i would later hang out w/ because he was friends w/ my friend frances, this asian dude named tim, he wrote 'faggot' on my whiteboard, but i asked him abt it later and he said he was just really high and doing stupid shit, i had a pretty good time hanging out w/ him when i did and felt like we would've been friends had we met earlier in the school year and hung out more, but since we met just before school ended and i went back home for the summer, i never saw or spoke to him again, i'm actually surprised i remember his name.
6.7. "we used to call them grenades & drink them in the back of a cadillac" = this line refers to getting a sixer of mickey's malt liquor as a teenager, the cadillac belonged to a friend of mine whom was most down to drink and drive around, interestingly, while i was going through poems earlier today i started cataloging lines that use the word 'feel' and i found these lines that refer to the exact same alcoholic beverage, but in forty form: "i used to drink mickey’s forty ounces / in green / to feel cool".
6.8. "orlando's the city i'd get my kids drunk in" = this line refers to when i was in disney world for the first time, we went to pleasure island to go shopping or something, like there was a virgin megastore there and a bunch of other shit, anyways, i remember being there and being aware that it was a place that adults went to party, and i was pissed that i couldn't party in disney world, even though i wasn't a partier yet, i wanted to party on pleasure island because it seemed cool, and i was pissed that i couldn't, so when i was writing this line i was thinking about that, because like i was a kid and like that was the first time i wanted to get drunk and it happened because i was in orlando, or something.
6.9./6.10. "what is a skirt when it's pulled up to yr tits / god it felt good when you looked that good" = these lines refer to the same thing, the first time i went to visit my first gf in omaha, we went on a date downtown in the old market, and she was wearing this thing that was like 'hip' at the time, i can't really describe it, but it's a certain type of shirt that like, doesn't have straps, and is tight around a girls chest, and then is like kind of loose around her waste, but like, most girls wore them as a shirt, like they'd wear it with jeans, but my first gf was like hella fly and kind of short so she bought one and wore it as like a dress, it was yellow, and she looked unbelievably sexy when she wore it, and basically every girl who wore that style of clothing looked like a bumpkin when they were standing next to her, anyways, while we were hanging out in the old market we ran into this family i sorta grew up w/, including a girl i graduated hs w/, and it was weird because they saw me w/ like this incredibly sexy girl and that felt good.
7.6. "or when you orchestrated a tack ball into jordan z's rat tail" = this line refers to this time a guy i went to elementary school threw a glob of ticky tac into another guy i went to school with's massive rat tail, the guy who threw the glob of ticky tac was more 'popular', the other guy was more of a 'nerd'.
8.3. "once i wrote a line about how my shoes were cleaning up vomit earlier" = this line refers to this poem.
8.4. "you weren't at all friendly to me when i tried to be friendly to you at the bar" = this line refers to an ongoing problem in my life where i would get fucked up and try to connect with people and then when they didn't want to connect w/ me for whatever reason, perhaps because i was clearly super fucked up, i would feel very hurt.
8.9. "when carrie texted me "SHITbox" i smiled" = this line refers to a total stranger whose phone number i got on facebook and we texted a bunch of times and i thought i was going to hang out w/ her but i never did.
9.9. "surf, for christ's sake." = this line refers to this poem which has been referenced by justin countless times to varying degrees.
Okay. Now I believe I have posted everything there is to post about this unfinished poem, but this blog post feels incomplete. I'm not sure what to do. The only thing to do is to post about how I feel. I feel strange that I have posted this many words about an incomplete poem instead of spending this time finishing the incomplete poem. However, I also feel somewhat good about all this. This post is strange and perhaps pointless and unreadable, which is exciting to me to some extent. What I was hoping to post about was how my ideas work, and how my work works, and how things happen, and then don't happen. But I feel as though this post is procrastination personified. Don't want to do the work? Do a lot of different work that you don't give a shit about. The challenge I have as a poet is not only doing work I give a shit about, I do a lot of work that I give a shit about, but not hating myself for doing work that I don't give a shit about. I thought this would be a post that I edited heavily, I thought it would be one of my long posts where I wrestle with my thoughts. This isn't one of those. This is just a bunch of stuff I typed as it occurred to me. And now it exists. But why? Why not? I could go on and on. All I know is there is a lot of work to do but unfortunately it can't always be done. I kind of want to write an endless string of clichés, like a long string of them that are as long as this post so far. Obviously, I could not pull that off. But it could, perhaps, be a draft for a post that I would never finish. Funny how that happens, eh? These blog posts are a way to avoid writing poems, but then I construct blog post drafts as a way to avoid writing blog posts. Don't want to avoid writing poems, avoid avoiding writing poems via coming up with an endless stream of blog post drafts. Do that forever. Then when you can't do that anymore write a poem. Then there is all this stuff to consider. There is just so much stuff to consider. I'm considering now, somehow, but I'm not sure if I am. My head is in a weird space right now. This post is finally crossing the threshold into completely unreadable. I feel pretty happy but also tired. I think I'm finished with this blog post.
Once upon a time I wrote a poem called KIDNEY LUST. How it happened was pretty simple. I wrote a bunch of short attempts at poems titled KIDNEY LUST. I was hoping that if I kept writing poems called KIDNEY LUST eventually I would write a poem called KIDNEY LUST that I liked. After awhile, that never worked, so I had all these poems that I didn't like. So I don't remember why I did this, I'd probably fucked around with methods this before to a lesser extent, but what I did was I took every line in all of the short attempts at poems titled KIDNEY LUST and wrote them down separately, so it was like I had a deck of cards of lines, then I started going through them randomly and typing them in the order they came out, and I did this for like an hour. So then, I had this gigantic thing that was a new attempt at writing a poem titled KIDNEY LUST. Then I read it and quickly edited it and then I had finished a poem I liked, titled KIDNEY LUST. That was basically how it happened.
After I wrote that poem I started writing more poems using that method, and it wasn't long before I was infatuated with the method. Then I started tinkering with the method, and what ended up happening is I was only interested in writing lines, and then constructing ways of putting them together that were to some extent beyond my control. I wrote a lot of poems this way.
Then I had a new idea. I would write fourteen sets of ten lines and then use those lines to construct fourteen sonnets. The idea was to develop a way to write sonnet sequences. I didn't get very far, not a single sonnet emerged from this. Not a single poem, just these lines, which are in a sense an unfinished poem. Here are the lines.
1
1. generally i think about things the way a rabbit living in a stoop thinks about things.
2. garbanzo beans, cook the garbanzo beans.
3. then becky texted me, 'that wait can be a real bitch'
4. i can only name one famous literary whale.
5. it all started when we started facebook chatting about the 'buy a hooker & just talk' precedent
6. moldy garbage makes me cough
7. i sprayed bug spray on yr toes
8. mercury butter makes me fatter
9. i think yr brain is detached from your brain
10. diddling ain't happening.
2
1. later when i licked yr toes you laughed & said, 'stop, that feels weird' but i didn't immediately stop & that's when i got tongue cancer'
2. but one of the rabbits still bit yr toes
3. we cooked italian food for the first time
4. as a big space rock flew frictionlessly through space
5. adolf hitler couldn't draw a toe to save his life
6. i've written more words on the internet than most prolific authors have in print
7. the first love story i wrote was about an island made of mud
8. when i think about yr tits i lick things.
9. then i did a joke 'a guy walks into a bar with a gun'
10. i like to joke how shooting heroin makes me cum.
[I just remembered a detail about the process. The first set of ten lines, I just randomly wrote lines that were interesting to me. I remember writing these lines in Noodles & Company on 72nd and Dodge Street. The second set of lines all 'followed' a line I chose from the first set of lines, and the line I chose from the first set of lines to have all the lines in the second set of lines follow from was the line 'i sprayed bug spray on yr toes'. Throughout the process I continued choosing one line from the previous set that all the lines from the next set would follow from. That way, when I was finished, with all the lines, I would have completed the first sonnet in the sonnet sequence, and the first sonnet would be less 'random' than the rest that would then emerge from the lines.]
[The line from the second set of lines that all the lines from the third set of lines followed from was the line 'as a big space rock flew frictionlessly through space'.]
3
1. the space rock driver liked to joke "next stop, montana" – people always said, "what is montana"
2. & at the center of the earth the descendants of the apocalypse cult with the best bomb shelter are having a quasi-incestual fuck fest
3. there aren't any bugs on the big space rock
4. it's funny how the term 'crash course' applies to .0000000000000000000000001% of the universe
5. our first fourth of july together you lit a firework called 'big space rock'
6. the scientist who invented the spork thought he would make something obsolete
7. a man on facebook told me there wasn't a room to masturbate in at his office.
8. shrimp sound good right now – we should eat shrimp.
9. i like/fear weird sensations in my heart.
10. i wish you knew yr biological family so you knew if yr biological family was littered with addicts.
[the line in the third set of lines that all the the lines from the fourth set of lines followed from was the line 'it's funny how the term 'crash course' applies to .0000000000000000000000001% of the universe']
4
1. girls/guys who are statisticians give the best blowjobs
2. wikipedia didn't know when the # of sequins on earth will surpass the # of grains of sand.
3. earlier this week i 'wrote a poem' while taking a walk cuz that's what wordsworth did except my poem was about a lotto billboard being struck by lightning
4. despite never traveling i'm quite good at packing a trunk
5. an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things
6. my shoulders are shaking
7. when i first set out to write a novel about oj simpson i had no idea that the tv would be the protagonist
8. i wish a robot had followed me my whole life – then i'd know the statistical variance between my sneezing without wearing bugspray & my sneezing with wearing bugspray.
9. i have to admit: i felt excited when i played catch with this girl last week
10. mostly i'm just frantically trying
[the line in the fourth set of lines that all the lines from the fifth set of lines followed from was the line 'an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things'.]
5
1. and the worst place to do no things
2. if it's filled with poison, bring your ant farm
3. did you get invited to too many or not enough pizza parties?
4. just imagine the time it takes george gervin to do a finger-roll is time.
5. i'm much less concerned by falling rock than running deer
6. to be quietly honest: i'm glad we told you about the fire
7. quote of the week: "be ready to suffer"
8. why take a nap?
9. after i called big easy a fat fuck there was a very special episode about big easy being a fat fuck
10. i made noises, then i said velvet, then i said velveeta, then i said verisimilitude, then i laughed
[the line from the fifth set of lines that all the lines from the sixth set of lines followed from was the line 'i made noises, then i said velvet, then i said velveeta, then i said verisimilitude, then i laughed'
6
1. then, yaknow, an orchard fell over. it was a movie set.
2. a portion of eyelashes are digested in stomach acid
3. oregon is the setting for my fake trip.
4. when we watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm someone wrote faggot on my white board.
5. would you mind if she clocked on & i clocked off & went outside?
6. renegotiate don't stop this train i try
7. we used to call them grenades & drink them in the back of a cadillac
8. orlando's the city i'd get my kids drunk in
9. what is a skirt when it's pulled up to yr tits
10. god it felt good when you looked that good
[none of the lines from the rest of the sets of lines followed from a specific line]
7
1. & i appreciate managerial accumin but the table of managers is being quite rude
2. todd said re: poets "i don't want to hear another fucking commercial" & i did a grin
3. ashley said re: poets "a trail of vowels" & i did a grin
4. kyle said re: poets "fucking sham poets" & i did a grin
5. think of putting a stone in a creek then fabricate
6. or when you orchestrated a tack ball into jordan z's rat tail
7. i erased it
8. how does it fuck a boy up to read esquire, watch pornography, & feel the need to complete drinks & lists & movies instead of, yaknow, fuck?
9. the clouds are PISSING ME OFF
10. try one of our delicious boneless blitz bundles.
8
1. i can't sleep
2. she was suddenly being incredible where she died.
3. once i wrote a line about how my shoes were cleaning up vomit earlier
4. you weren't at all friendly to me when i tried to be friendly to you at the bar
5. the only girl i've found on okcupid who is also looking only for friends is extremely attractive
6. like that swedish filmmaker, he used to be a poet
7. i just have canned material for when i meet people, i htink that's cool
8. i'm stormlipped, tired, & brewing
9. when carrie texted me "SHITbox" i smiled
10. really i am looking only for friends but i just want blowjobs too
9
1. the naked sound of a body smells like a trumpet.
2. it consists of caves and neither of them knew it.
3. i'll tell you a story to drink that hard liquor form the cold bitter cup.
4. the long walk down somebody's half-dream.
5. keep us warm while the night grows.
6. there is a mind beating in that pile of rubble
7. for you i would build a whole new universe.
8. i have seen your slips & came home sweating
9. surf, for christ's sake.
10. at least we both know how shitty the world is.
That was as far as I got. I wrote nine sets of ten lines. Then I stopped. From the idea that all the lines in one set would follow from one of the lines in the previous set, this fragment emerged:
i sprayed bug spray on yr toesAt a certain point while writing these lines, something happened. What happened was my friend found a bottle of Xanax at a bar in Omaha and decided to keep it. It was like 100 bars of Xanax or something. Everyone around me was using Xanax heavily for a little while there, but then one of my friends ate a bunch of bars of Xanax over the course of a few days and basically like had half a week erased in a mega fucked up blur. At some point during that blur he talked to his parents and they were very concerned and came down immediately to see if he was alright. He told them he had been abusing Xanax, that was why he was behaving erratically, then all the Xanax disappeared. It was all very strange. While I was writing these lines this happened, and I got the idea that I should title this poem sequence XANAXGATE, which I think is an awesome title for a poem sequence.
as a big space rock flew frictionlessly through space
it's funny how the term 'crash course' only applies to .000000000000000000000001% of the universe
an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things
Here is a part from my poem FAT PAUL NEWMAN:
i was surroundedOriginally, what I wrote longhand was, "i was surrounded / to write a poem / called XANAXGATE", but I changed it to "xanax" because I thought it was funnier/more interesting.
to write a poem
called xanax
Also while I was writing these lines, something else happened. What happened was my friend got dumped by his girlfriend, a girl who he had referred to as variations of "the girl I'm going to marry" and shit like that. This was also strange, and I thought that I should also write a poem sequence called DUMPGATE, which I also think is an awesome title for a poem sequence.
Now, titling poems gives them some direction that simply writing does not always have, so I had on my hands two incomplete poem sequences, one called XANAXGATE that was partially complete, and one called DUMPGATE that only existed as a title. What this means is I had a lot of work to do to finish these poem sequences. And what happened was, I never did it. I'm not sure why I never did it, but I have a few ideas.
The first idea is that the method, of randomizing lines and then turning the randomized mass into a poem sequence, is rather tedious. That is, it is much more tedious than simply writing. This possibly contributed to me never finishing either of these poems.
The second idea is that perhaps I started wanting to do 'too much' with these poems. It's one thing to want to write a poem, but here I wanted to write twenty-eight poems. That is a lot of poems. This surely contributed to me never finishing either of these poems.
The third idea is that I started writing something else, but I'm not sure what I started writing.
The tfourth idea is that I started writing somewhere else, as in in a different notebook, but I'm not sure which notebook I started writing in, or if I did that.
There are a lot more ideas but the point is I stopped this project for some dumb random reason, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it kind of bums me out a bit I guess.
Now, I have written a lot about this unfinished poem, which eventually became twenty-eight unfinished poems, but what I'm going to do next is go through every line in the nine sets of ten lines and try to remember the impetus for the line. Okay.
1.1. "generally i think about things the way a rabbit living in a stoop thinks about things." = this line refers to the stoop at my house, which rabbits used to live underneath and around, but no longer do, because the giant bushes near the stoop were removed by our landlords, i have written about rabbits with some frequency, surely this is only because i lived near and around rabbits for so long.
1.3. "then becky texted me, 'that wait can be a real bitch'" = this line refers to a time when i asked a friend of my to contact my ex-gf for me, and the friend eventually texted me the line quoted in this line, referring to how hard it is to wait for people you desperately want to talk to to want to talk to you also, or something.
1.4. "i can only name one famous literary whale." = this line refers to moby dick, i was thinking about moby dick when i wrote this line, but recently i wrote a line where i referred to moby dick and shamoo, and now that i think about it i think it is fair to consider shamoo a literary whale as well, it's funny that i'm still preoccupied with literary whales to some extent.
1.5. "it all started when we started facebook chatting about the 'buy a hooker & just talk' precedent" = this line refers to me and amanda talking about 'the catcher in the rye', which we talked about during one of our earlier facebook chats, if i recall, i'm not sure what i mean by 'it all started' or what 'it' is that 'started' but it seems possible that i was referring to my friendship with amanda.
1.10. "diddling ain't happening." = this line refers to the fact that i was not getting laid at the time, which was rather frustrating.
2.1. "later when i licked yr toes you laughed & said, 'stop, that feels weird' but i didn't immediately stop & that's when i got tongue cancer'" = this line refers to an instance that occurred many years before i wrote these lines when i was licking my first gf's toes and she thought it felt weird and asked me to stop but i didn't immediately stop, but i didn't get tongue cancer, haha.
2.5. "adolf hitler couldn't draw a toe to save his life" = in the self-help book 'the war of art' steven pressfield alludes to the fact that had hitler succeeded as an artist the holocaust perhaps may have been avoided, which is a strange and perhaps stupid thought but it stuck with me for some reason and i remember thinking about that part in the book when i was writing that line.
2.6. "i've written more words on the internet than most prolific authors have in print" = this line refers to all the posting i've done on message boards over the years, which for a long time i considered a waste of time but recently i have come to believe to be a part of my 'larger writing practice' and therefore not a waste of time but ultimately a very healthy 'work' that needed to be done for me to become much better at writing, i believe this line is an early instance of me beginning to recognize the fact that my massive amount of writing on message boards was of value to me, as opposed to a waste, that is, it was an instance of me looking to my past and feeling satisfied with how i spent my time, and it fills me with hope that i can eventually view all aspects of my past through a positive lense as opposed to one where i beat myself up about what i did or didn't do.
2.7. "the first love story i wrote was about an island made of mud" = this line refers to this thing i wrote, which i recently emailed to a friend of mine in an attempt to explain a lot of different things, it would take for fucking ever to go into it, all that matters is that was the 'story' i was referring to in this line.
2.10. "i like to joke how shooting heroin makes me cum." = this line refers to something i read once on a message board about how when you shoot heroin you cum in your pants, which was really funny to me at the time and i guess had somehow not occurred to me, but since i read it i have countlessly referred to heroin and how heroin makes you cum in yr pants when you shoot it up, including during our long drive to boise, wherein me and justin riffed 'endlessly' about the idea of using a line about cumming in yr pants in a poem, and since then justin has written a poem or two that alludes to cumming in yr pants as a result of injecting heroin, i'm not sure if i have successfully alluded to heroin/cumming in pants in a poem yet.
3.2. "& at the center of the earth the descendants of the apocalypse cult with the best bomb shelter are having a quasi-incestual fuck fest" = i believe this line refers to one of the matrix movies, i believe i was thinking of one of the matrix sequels while i wrote this line
3.5. "our first fourth of july together you lit a firework called 'big space rock'" = i was def thinking abt my first gf when i wrote this line, because she is the only gf i spent fourth of july w/, and i remember thinking abt that when i wrote this line, but there is no firework called 'big space rock'
3.7. "a man on facebook told me there wasn't a room to masturbate in at his office." = this line refers to a strange fb chat i had with a guy who i didn't know but had mutual friends w/ and so added on fb, who started talking to me abt how badly he wanted to masturbate but there was nowhere for him to masturbate at his office.
3.9. "i like/fear weird sensations in my heart." = this line refers to a subject i wrote abt countless times, which is before my healthfulness renaissance, this thing repeatedly happened where i'd be sitting around getting fucked up and my chest would feel tight, or strange, or like 'suddenly different', this was very frightening, and i was basically worried that i was going to have some sort of heart attack/stroke for two years or so, and i wrote abt it constantly.
4.2. "wikipedia didn't know when the # of sequins on earth will surpass the # of grains of sand." = when i was writing this line i was thinking abt this time i was in pe in 11th or 10th grade and it was just after prom and there were some sequins on the ground, and i picked one up and my friend who sat next to me in pe picked one up, and how it went is like, i was like, 'check this out i found a sequin', then he grabbed one and was like, 'pff who cares i found one too', and i was like, 'good point, stupid sequin', and threw my sequin on the ground, then he threw his sequin on the ground, then i grabbed both sequins, and he tried to play it off like i didn't fucking jedi mind trick him into losing his sequin, but i did, i think abt this often, and probably will for a long time, and i was thinking abt this when i wrote this line.
4.3. "earlier this week i 'wrote a poem' while taking a walk cuz that's what wordsworth did except my poem was about a lotto billboard being struck by lightning" = this line refers to this dumb poem i wrote while walking after having a conversation w/ kyle abt wordsworth.
4.5. "an empty swimming pool is the best place to do most things" = when i wrote this line i was thinking abt this portion of a summer where the swimming pool in my home town was getting renovated so it wasn't filled with water and me and my friends would always sneak in and fuck around at the bottom of the swimming pool, it was fun and felt 'romantic' at the time, as it was happening i mean.
4.7. "when i first set out to write a novel about oj simpson i had no idea that the tv would be the protagonist" = i used to have this idea for a novel called 'be juice', i'm not really sure what it was going to be but i thought i could write a lot abt oj simpson and eventually have an experimental novel, i think i had two pages, they were really bad, or maybe they weren't but like it was all a farce, i was trying to tell myself that all i needed to create a massive text was a mildly interesting idea then the rest would just sort of follow from that, but this line was written before i had abandoned this 'be juice' idea and recognized it as worthless/fraudulent.
4.9. "i have to admit: i felt excited when i played catch with this girl last week" = this line refers to this time i was hanging out w/ some friends and this girl was w/ us, who was friends w/ one of my friends, and we went to some party and i almost got us kicked out by being insanely drunk, but eventually we came back to my house and started playing beer pong and i got this girl to come into my room and start giving me a blowjob, and it was a thing where i was like blacking out and don't really remember what happened but do remember getting head, anyways later that girl was over at the house and we were sitting on opposite couches while all these other motherfuckers were chatting or whatever and we started playing catch w/ this goofy toy football, and i felt excited because i felt like maybe that meant she liked me or something, but i don't think i've seen her since then, probably because i never got her number, wtf is wrong w/ me.
5.9. "after i called big easy a fat fuck there was a very special episode about big easy being a fat fuck" = this line refers to a brief stage in my life where i was consistently watching real world road rules challenge and making jokes abt how fat big easy was if anyone was in the room while i was watching it.
6.4. "when we watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm someone wrote faggot on my white board." = this line refers to the first valentine's day i ever spent w/ a girl, which i spent w/ my first gf before she was my first gf, and we ate burger king and later watched 'my fair lady' in my dorm room and probably made out for like 4 hours straight or something, and this dude, who i would later hang out w/ because he was friends w/ my friend frances, this asian dude named tim, he wrote 'faggot' on my whiteboard, but i asked him abt it later and he said he was just really high and doing stupid shit, i had a pretty good time hanging out w/ him when i did and felt like we would've been friends had we met earlier in the school year and hung out more, but since we met just before school ended and i went back home for the summer, i never saw or spoke to him again, i'm actually surprised i remember his name.
6.7. "we used to call them grenades & drink them in the back of a cadillac" = this line refers to getting a sixer of mickey's malt liquor as a teenager, the cadillac belonged to a friend of mine whom was most down to drink and drive around, interestingly, while i was going through poems earlier today i started cataloging lines that use the word 'feel' and i found these lines that refer to the exact same alcoholic beverage, but in forty form: "i used to drink mickey’s forty ounces / in green / to feel cool".
6.8. "orlando's the city i'd get my kids drunk in" = this line refers to when i was in disney world for the first time, we went to pleasure island to go shopping or something, like there was a virgin megastore there and a bunch of other shit, anyways, i remember being there and being aware that it was a place that adults went to party, and i was pissed that i couldn't party in disney world, even though i wasn't a partier yet, i wanted to party on pleasure island because it seemed cool, and i was pissed that i couldn't, so when i was writing this line i was thinking about that, because like i was a kid and like that was the first time i wanted to get drunk and it happened because i was in orlando, or something.
6.9./6.10. "what is a skirt when it's pulled up to yr tits / god it felt good when you looked that good" = these lines refer to the same thing, the first time i went to visit my first gf in omaha, we went on a date downtown in the old market, and she was wearing this thing that was like 'hip' at the time, i can't really describe it, but it's a certain type of shirt that like, doesn't have straps, and is tight around a girls chest, and then is like kind of loose around her waste, but like, most girls wore them as a shirt, like they'd wear it with jeans, but my first gf was like hella fly and kind of short so she bought one and wore it as like a dress, it was yellow, and she looked unbelievably sexy when she wore it, and basically every girl who wore that style of clothing looked like a bumpkin when they were standing next to her, anyways, while we were hanging out in the old market we ran into this family i sorta grew up w/, including a girl i graduated hs w/, and it was weird because they saw me w/ like this incredibly sexy girl and that felt good.
7.6. "or when you orchestrated a tack ball into jordan z's rat tail" = this line refers to this time a guy i went to elementary school threw a glob of ticky tac into another guy i went to school with's massive rat tail, the guy who threw the glob of ticky tac was more 'popular', the other guy was more of a 'nerd'.
8.3. "once i wrote a line about how my shoes were cleaning up vomit earlier" = this line refers to this poem.
8.4. "you weren't at all friendly to me when i tried to be friendly to you at the bar" = this line refers to an ongoing problem in my life where i would get fucked up and try to connect with people and then when they didn't want to connect w/ me for whatever reason, perhaps because i was clearly super fucked up, i would feel very hurt.
8.9. "when carrie texted me "SHITbox" i smiled" = this line refers to a total stranger whose phone number i got on facebook and we texted a bunch of times and i thought i was going to hang out w/ her but i never did.
9.9. "surf, for christ's sake." = this line refers to this poem which has been referenced by justin countless times to varying degrees.
Okay. Now I believe I have posted everything there is to post about this unfinished poem, but this blog post feels incomplete. I'm not sure what to do. The only thing to do is to post about how I feel. I feel strange that I have posted this many words about an incomplete poem instead of spending this time finishing the incomplete poem. However, I also feel somewhat good about all this. This post is strange and perhaps pointless and unreadable, which is exciting to me to some extent. What I was hoping to post about was how my ideas work, and how my work works, and how things happen, and then don't happen. But I feel as though this post is procrastination personified. Don't want to do the work? Do a lot of different work that you don't give a shit about. The challenge I have as a poet is not only doing work I give a shit about, I do a lot of work that I give a shit about, but not hating myself for doing work that I don't give a shit about. I thought this would be a post that I edited heavily, I thought it would be one of my long posts where I wrestle with my thoughts. This isn't one of those. This is just a bunch of stuff I typed as it occurred to me. And now it exists. But why? Why not? I could go on and on. All I know is there is a lot of work to do but unfortunately it can't always be done. I kind of want to write an endless string of clichés, like a long string of them that are as long as this post so far. Obviously, I could not pull that off. But it could, perhaps, be a draft for a post that I would never finish. Funny how that happens, eh? These blog posts are a way to avoid writing poems, but then I construct blog post drafts as a way to avoid writing blog posts. Don't want to avoid writing poems, avoid avoiding writing poems via coming up with an endless stream of blog post drafts. Do that forever. Then when you can't do that anymore write a poem. Then there is all this stuff to consider. There is just so much stuff to consider. I'm considering now, somehow, but I'm not sure if I am. My head is in a weird space right now. This post is finally crossing the threshold into completely unreadable. I feel pretty happy but also tired. I think I'm finished with this blog post.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
A POEM TO READ TO AMANDA BEFORE GOING FOR A RUN
thanks for being my friend & making the sun out of everything
thanks for melting in a way that melts other things
what i mean is what i mean is thanks
i'm going to write this poem
then read it to myself
then call you & read it to you
then the rest of eternity will happen
i think it is all very good
i am thinking about chopping the head off a rooster
& drinking the blood
about how sharp thoughts can be
about how easy it is for me to cry
i used to have a speech impediment
but now i feel free
free enough i mean
the world isn't exactly made of my piss
but everybody's piss belongs to me
more than that it belongs to you
& when it's near you it boils
the world boils in a nourishing way
and thanks for letting me smell
what a great line
"and thanks for letting me smell"
if only it was the ending line but it isn't
and we aren't flowers
but maybe we are portraits
or maybe the poem will face the same heroic death we all face
i'm just trying to say thanks for being my friend
before the next terrible things happens
OH YEAH!
i talked to a guy in subway today
a guy who fixes fridges who was good at talking about how he hated his job and smiled while talking about that
this is a poem about that burly motherfucker
who was great to talk to but also it is about you
& how happy i am that you are my friend
& i hope your ears don't fall off during a freezing expedition
but i don't know what else to write about
except something new
the kind of mansion i would like to build
the kind of mansion i would like to build is a very small room
the kind of mansion i would like to build is a nice human with curly hair
or a screen to stare at moderately
or a cup for me to fill for someone else
you, me, or anyone
there isn't enough life in the cup
so i keep writing more lines
until i don't have to
& soon i won't have to
& soon i will be running
& then i will be home
& then i will be away
thanks for melting in a way that melts other things
what i mean is what i mean is thanks
i'm going to write this poem
then read it to myself
then call you & read it to you
then the rest of eternity will happen
i think it is all very good
i am thinking about chopping the head off a rooster
& drinking the blood
about how sharp thoughts can be
about how easy it is for me to cry
i used to have a speech impediment
but now i feel free
free enough i mean
the world isn't exactly made of my piss
but everybody's piss belongs to me
more than that it belongs to you
& when it's near you it boils
the world boils in a nourishing way
and thanks for letting me smell
what a great line
"and thanks for letting me smell"
if only it was the ending line but it isn't
and we aren't flowers
but maybe we are portraits
or maybe the poem will face the same heroic death we all face
i'm just trying to say thanks for being my friend
before the next terrible things happens
OH YEAH!
i talked to a guy in subway today
a guy who fixes fridges who was good at talking about how he hated his job and smiled while talking about that
this is a poem about that burly motherfucker
who was great to talk to but also it is about you
& how happy i am that you are my friend
& i hope your ears don't fall off during a freezing expedition
but i don't know what else to write about
except something new
the kind of mansion i would like to build
the kind of mansion i would like to build is a very small room
the kind of mansion i would like to build is a nice human with curly hair
or a screen to stare at moderately
or a cup for me to fill for someone else
you, me, or anyone
there isn't enough life in the cup
so i keep writing more lines
until i don't have to
& soon i won't have to
& soon i will be running
& then i will be home
& then i will be away
Thursday, May 10, 2012
it's a
monkey
in
space
flipping off the
janitor
this mohawked
writer said
i'm not interested
in being the
'super man'
i want to be
the janitor
i can say
whatever
the fuck i
want & people
like you don't
think i
should sing
because i'm
too ugly or
too pretty
or i don't
know how to
sing
let's sublimate
all the foreigners
together–just
so you know
i'd eat my
own jizz in
a zero gravity
environment
i'd have to
or there'd
just be globs
of jizz
floating
around
monkey
in
space
flipping off the
janitor
this mohawked
writer said
i'm not interested
in being the
'super man'
i want to be
the janitor
i can say
whatever
the fuck i
want & people
like you don't
think i
should sing
because i'm
too ugly or
too pretty
or i don't
know how to
sing
let's sublimate
all the foreigners
together–just
so you know
i'd eat my
own jizz in
a zero gravity
environment
i'd have to
or there'd
just be globs
of jizz
floating
around
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
TRUTH BOMB TUESDAY
something about truth bomb tuesdaythat was the original draft for this post
something about listening to 2pac interviews
how he was a truth bomb factory
how i wanted to make honesty
an internet meme
i had this idea that it would be cool to do honest shit on the internet every tuesday
truth bomb tuesday
my boss just said "we don't need to bend our brains"
for one truth bomb tuesday, i emailed this writer who wrote this article that made me weep and tried to express to him how important it was to me
i also explained the whole 'truth bomb tuesday' impetus within the email
he never responded to the email which is cool
but i wonder if he just doesn't respond to 'fan mail' or if the 'truth bomb tuesday' impetus repulsed him
it's probably bad to like
wonder about this?
it's scary being honest, at least it is for me
sometimes i read this essay
http://lungfull.org/16/16editorial.html
here are some quotes from it
How can poetry be expected to do much when the overarching goal of a poet is to get readings & publishing credits or, increasingly in the past few decades, a nice respectable job.
To be a poet is to be a failure foreveri'm not sure what to write about
i'm going to listen to music
i know what i want to write about
Thursday, April 12, 2012
I STOPPED GIVING A SHIT ABOUT THE AIR
this is the first true test
i'm made of lizards
enchanted by skulls
i rant at the clouds of the world
turning a cartoon god
into a cartoon, god
i've battled them all before
the scaly ones
made of a slippery version
of love
"what do you write about?"
the face of a lion asks
"i am drowning in the aboutness of the world!"
i scream
drowning
in a dense black sand
please please please
climb me out of it
harpoon me into the hope
i mean
i mean
the fingernail forest
is filling up
with grey dots
i'm made of lizards
enchanted by skulls
i rant at the clouds of the world
turning a cartoon god
into a cartoon, god
i've battled them all before
the scaly ones
made of a slippery version
of love
"what do you write about?"
the face of a lion asks
"i am drowning in the aboutness of the world!"
i scream
drowning
in a dense black sand
please please please
climb me out of it
harpoon me into the hope
i mean
i mean
the fingernail forest
is filling up
with grey dots
Monday, April 9, 2012
THE VERDANT TOE
The teatottler drank some water in a bathtub of water.
And a toe was stuck in the drain. A cock roach feeler
made of glass sparkled like broken pottery next to the toe
which festered with bacteria, the green yellow slime turning the water.
Hey Ho said the toe I'm smiling the sea. Stay away from axe murderers.
Will you be my albatross? To your steak I will be your apple sauce.
It's funny actually, my little story of loss lives inside the porcelain,
beneath the verdant moss, where the glowing snails glow and my plumby insides
are as cold as snow. Do you remember the night I told you what stars are?
Did you forget or did you (know)?
I am Poseidon said Poseidon I only forget what I have known.
You are no one's toe.
written in collaboration w/ Joy Von Ill, Feng Sun Chen, and Natasha Kessler.
And a toe was stuck in the drain. A cock roach feeler
made of glass sparkled like broken pottery next to the toe
which festered with bacteria, the green yellow slime turning the water.
Hey Ho said the toe I'm smiling the sea. Stay away from axe murderers.
Will you be my albatross? To your steak I will be your apple sauce.
It's funny actually, my little story of loss lives inside the porcelain,
beneath the verdant moss, where the glowing snails glow and my plumby insides
are as cold as snow. Do you remember the night I told you what stars are?
Did you forget or did you (know)?
I am Poseidon said Poseidon I only forget what I have known.
You are no one's toe.
written in collaboration w/ Joy Von Ill, Feng Sun Chen, and Natasha Kessler.
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