April 2012
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I didn't find love on the Astral Plane either
My heart is a halfway house for men on their way to loving someone else.
(Lovelessness will kill me)
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In this club we are all naked and our scars and stretch marks are brushed with phosphorescent paint. Our pain dances in the dark together.
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Bruise on my left breast preserved in digital memory; him biting his way to my heart.
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In our father’s house In our father’s house In our father’s house In our father’s house In our father’s house my knees bend my tongue wafers
my tongue blends the wine my knees waver in our father’s house
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dialoghost:
“you know & that countless vitality controlled wave-train vibration mind- fullness on results of a psychoversatility of mood, sleep, memory & salivary stress the changes produced better depression & meditation involvement of toning arousal — a core arousal distribution in a moving release negate & induce the flow of formed heads in the body-minute created by a yoga...
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Jamais vu, recognising you stealing from the past, before I ever fell in love with you. I am blooded on plunder.
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Blown by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Have you lost your mind, are you wingstruck, is there a piece of you gone, why can’t that fire fall out of your chest or are you completely unstrung with the stripping him down to the hot quick of you and too lamentably eyesick, voicesick, breastsick to understand there’s no hope for you— you must be lightdead, you must be socket blown, heartshot, blinded by doves and he will not...
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Tonight he shorted out an expensive hair dryer blowing hot air on my back like a massage, and hot air on my bruises and welts like a burn.
All the hair dryer needed was to cool down. I plugged it back in and it works.
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La Pelona as Birdwoman [excerpt] by Rigoberto...
Tonight I dared to crawl beneath the sheets to be nailed down around me, waiting for my lover, she who enters without knocking, she who will unstitch my every seam along my thigh, my side, my armpit. She who carves a heart out of the heart and drops it down her throat. Sweet surrender this slow death in sleep as I dream the love-making is autopsy. How else will I be hers completely? Be her...
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Rock Me on the Waters, Joseph Stroud
Whitman says, All has been gentle with me. Lucky him. Lucky the one who has no account with lamentation. And yet of it we string the harp for a larger music. The sun pours down honey over the bodies of lovers who make of their bed a small boat that rocks in the sea of morning, rocking in waves, of light and leavings.
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Banango Street Issue 1 Has Launched!
banangolit:
You should probably check this out.
I have two poems in this, go read! Lots of great poems to read and artwork by Theron Jacobs.
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16 Poems by Roberto Bolaño
31. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn. 32. I dreamt I was dreaming and I came home too late. In my bed I found Mário de Sá-Carneiro sleeping with my first love. When I uncovered them I found they were dead...
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I am done hitching to stars, I am done looking for men who are anchors. I am going to scatter stardust and saltwater, and eat salted plums. I’ll light the way across the ocean, like a runway to a drowning.
(I existed in a halo of light until I broke my crown for you)
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We were lovers and he bookmarked me.
Now I am pages he thumbs occasionally, but thumbing
feels like ripping and I am a book I
wish he’d thrown on the fire.
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All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann by...
EYES: Medium HAIR: Medium WEIGHT: Medium HEIGHT: Medium DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: None NUMBER OF FINGERS: Ten NUMBER OF TOES: Ten INTELLIGENCE: Medium What did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva? Madness?
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Skin Like Brick Dust, Saeed Jones
In bed, your back curved to answer the heat of my holding & Harlem was barely awake below us when a half-broken building gave in. First, a few loose bricks, then decades crashed to the street just as a bus pulled up. Passengers, choking on dust, rushed to escape the wrecked weight of someone else’s memory. Two blocks beyond gravity, I pressed into you, into you & away from all the...
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Casket Sharp, Saeed Jones
Your soft cough becomes prognosis. Soon, cigarette smoke is the inkblot test of the lung. Tell me what you see and I’ll sleepwalk home to pick out your first and last charcoal suit, a jade handkerchief for the pocket atop your excavated chest. I see two men, father & son but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, goner. And now? A dirge parades past our empty house, black...
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“These are the battles that are fought daily between Catholic school graduates,...”
– Monica Hesse, AP’s approval of ‘hopefully’ symbolizes larger debate over language
(via sketchyjoe)
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Come Trembling, Traci Brimhall
In the country where believers eat the bodies of the gods, we meet a priest who pulls a rope of thorns through his tongue to make his mind pure enough for a vision. He dances to music we can’t hear and waits to come trembling into knowledge. We don’t recognize ourselves in his radiance, but we do in his suffering. He passes through pain and into healing without seeing the holy rendered visible. He...
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Alternate Take: Levon Helm by Tracy K. Smith
I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines, Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth. And this whole time a hot wind’s been swatting down my door, Spat from his mouth and landing smack against my ear. All day pounding the devil out of six lines and coming up dry While he drives donuts through my...
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“I hope I get so many roses I die.”
– wherewolves, who I am quoting out of context
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Not Getting Closer, Jack Gilbert
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul under the almost full moon. Lost for the last two hours. Finishing a loaf of bread and worried about the curfew. I have not spoken for three days and I am thinking, “Why not just settle for love? Why not just settle for love instead?”
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Watchpoetsorg:
down the stairs to hell.
All my life, since I was ten, I’ve been waiting to be in this hell here with you; all I’ve ever wanted, and still do. (1982) Alice Notley, from Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005
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“I want to go back to bed and get inside her. That’s the only time there’s...”
– Leonard Cohen, The End of My Life in Art (via whiskeyleaks)
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junkview:
Exit Sol the24project:
An antique pushchair sways to the howl of rag & bone, the ring-tone of those who see jackpots in skips. I’m bored says the newborn inside, while its mother presses her lips against the double glazing to feed off the remains of fairytales falling onto the fact of window sills. The bairn asks will you change her bag...
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The absence of romantic love was like being stabbed. Now I’m medicating it, it’s more like dehydration.
Love is like Tupac, a hologram I can put my fist through but it will never touch me.
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Rooms, Joseph Stroud
Remembrance belongs to them that were here. Alkman The stars and the rivers and waves call you back. Pindar For the world must be loved this much If you’re to say “I lived.” Hikmet What if you could live in a cowslip’s bell. Like Ariel. Or like the bee who nudges its way inside and emerges burnished with pollen. Look — a hummingbird plunges its head into a...
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An Illness Like Any Other, Rachel Vigier
It’s an illness like any other, Van Gogh wrote, as the flashes behind his eyes kept popping while in his hands the brush’s marked determination to continue exploded beyond the canvas, hands and eyes, together, wrestling the mind into some kind of submission. The glory of it assaulted him every time. I have been working on a size 20 canvas in the open air in an orchard, lilac plowland, a...
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Thirst, Mary Oliver
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what...
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“JW: I really think, well… Let’s not call this “sexism.” Let’s call it an...”
– Jeanette Winterson
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God took my shift on the phone sex line, instructing me “Ask to be touched until your voice is not a husk but light. I’ll pick up where you left off.”
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So I know, Bob Hicock
He put moisturizer the morning he shot thirty-three people. That stands out. The desire to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR that’s what I want, to be soft, or the guy from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says we should chat. Such a casual word, chat. I’m chatting to myself now: you did not do enough about the kid who took your class a few buildings from where he killed. This is my...
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The Soul Bone, Susan Wood
Once I said I didn’t have a spiritual bone in my body and meant by that I didn’t want to think of death, as though any bone in us could escape it. Maybe I was afraid of what I couldn’t know for certain, a thud like the slamming of a coffin lid, as final and inexplicable as that. What was the soul anyway, I wondered, but a homonym for loneliness? Now, in late middle age, or more, I like to imagine...
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Important Things
tphd:
We forget a lot of things along the way to wisdom.
We forget to carry ourself into things
We forget to be ready
There is a moment just past wisdom which is very much like singing
in an empty marketplace
or losing your shoes in the afternoon
You need to be ready to lose your shoes in the afternoon
or abandon a magic trick
in the river at midnight
It’s important
to own your own...
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