Faith

I pass from one moment to the next thinking only of food, of sustenance and creation. I dream of new flavors, textures and aroma, envision techniques for transformation as I pass silver garlic presses and stark white immersion blenders. I scour cupboard and grocery aisles for sharp spice profiles, rounded bellies of sweet miracles yet unbirthed from oven. In the course of a day I am a traveller, humbled, awed. Each meal transports me to India, Turkey, Argentina, Senegal or Morocco. In Savannah, I tasted evaporating campfire pork, a recipe passed down from a time older than the word chef, and bathed in the Louisianna bayou as steam rose from a bowl of turnip greens. In Los Angeles, Cantonese fusion street food reduced me to my knees, panting and salivating at their pulpit, wide-eyed at visions of light-streaked skies in a future China that almost exists. I watched the food truck disappear around a corner to deliver its gospel to another parking lot full of expectant time travellers, willing converts. After each meal is consumed and the visions have faded, dissipated into memory, I cannot believe I've had enough by the end of it. I have seen countless countries, peoples, pasts and futures through tongue and teeth, lips and nose, through saliva. To experience cooked flesh of fish transformed to butter as its moved across hard range of ridges on roof of mouth, to digest in fading sunlight where silhouettes of powerlines merge with mountains purpled by the passage of another day is psalm, is prayer, is the denial of death, the truest form of faith.

Thank Yous and All Apologies

Hi folks,

I'd like to thank everyone who has visited the site and read the interviews with Charlene Luck and Darrel Holnes, and, of course, a big thanks to those two inspiring writers. For everyone who's dealt with my sporadic updates as of late, an especially big ups to you - I'm not making more frequent postings a New Years resolution, but I will do my best in the next year to post something each month, poetry-related or not.

As 2013 draws to a close, my thoughts are occupied with reminiscence and that nagging "I wish I'd done more" B.S., but I can't help but think of the future. It's been a big year for the blog, and this next year is pregnant with epic possibilities and I'm excited and a little frightened of what may come. If you enjoyed the interviews, I am lining up a few more authors for interviews for a spring feature, and I am kicking around the idea of creating a sister site dedicated exclusively to the business side of writing sometime this summer. I'll keep everyone posted if that latter idea comes to fruition.

In the meantime, please enjoy a re-write of "Nomadic Tongue", a poem posted here back in September. I hope the holiday season was kind to all of you, and I hope you are all still inspired and warmed by writing as I am.

Humbled,

Alexander Lloyd Johnson

Interviews are LIVE

Hi folks!


To the right, under the "Pages" list, you'll notice two new pages featuring interviews with the Fiction Editor at the literary journal 94 Creations Charlene Luck, and poet, playwright and musician Darrel Alejandro Holnes. What these folks have to say about writing is the truth, their truth. The sho' 'nuff.

It is also my hope to send out poems to journals and contests in the near future (this wedding isn't going to pay for itself), but as I take down poems from the blog, I will be replacing them with new ones, and maybe even a guest poem here and there.

Much thanks and love goes out to Darrel and Charlene. Thank you for your patience with me and for your amazing answers to my otherwise dull questions. Interviews with Samiya Bashir and Stephanie Douglass to come later this month.

Your department store security guard and part-time webmaster,

Alexander L. Johnson

Interviews

Hi folks,

Sorry for the delay with the new content I promised, and I appreciate your patience. I'm waiting to hear back from a couple of authors on the second round of questions, but I should have the interviews up by the end of the month. Thank you to everyone who's supported this venture, and big ups to the authors who've dedicated their time and effort to make this project happen.

Hurried,
A.L.J.

Bury me in New Orleans

At a recently divorced friend's birthday, over eggplant parmesean & sparkling water, their grandmother regailed us with stories of her visit to New Orleans. What stuck in her mind more than the architecture or the people was what they did with their dead. Y'know they don't bury their dead the way we do. They bury their departed on mounds of earth, so they don't float away. I imagined four in the morning, when there's only the vicious lying in wait or the homeless or the hopelessly in love left on the streets, that the dead walk the city in a daze, shake branches and manipulate breezes to chill the living with their memories of what their New Orleans used to be. I imagine they dance on streetlamps & moon the public servants who patrol the parks collecting trash. I imagine that the inhabitants retired by time, hit & runs, bar brawls gone wrong & broken hearts congregate near fountains & give speeches on how they ought to reclaim their lost cities. They can never come to a concensus because each city they remember cannot recognize its sister reality. I would be so bored to be buried in some suburban nursing home for the expired, extinguished. That silence, that everlasting silence must be what produces such violent spirits. Play Dixieland jazz on my death-day & the Blues on my Birthday. Make an awful racket. Bury me in New Orleans & lay travel guides & trip planners, political poetry & the World News section on my grave. I want to remain involved, up to date. Bury me so I too rest at your eye level, able to walk the streets of someone else's city. Visit me with stories of exuberance, of love & loss, of everything that will remind me what it means to die, to live.

Tailpipe Blues

Wonder why I’m so dark?
It’s ‘cause I live in ya tailpipe.
Wonder why I’m so dark?
It’s ‘cause I live in ya tailpipe.

I crawled out th’ oilpan – it ain’t been drained in hundreds a’ years.
I been searchin’ for a way ta clear out cha ears, but now
I’m siph’nin’ off gas, storin’ it up jus'
waitin’ fo’ tha right time
ta mess wit’ ‘cha injectas an ya fuel line –
waitin’ for the right time ta blow ya sky high
(who’s got a light?)…
I’m dismantlin’ ya crankshaft
rippin’ out cho pistons,
one by one,
an’ I’ma bust cho face open
ta’ see if we bleed
th’ same black poetics,
sing the body ‘lectric.

You wonder why I’m so dark?
It’s ‘cause I live in ya tailpipe.
Wonder why I’m so dark?
It’s ‘cause I live in ya tailpipe.
You wonder why I’m so dark???
It’s ‘cause I live in ya TAILPIPE!

I been sittin’ in the back this whole time, diggin’
th’ heart’s death on “Time Outta Mind.”In tha
backs of classes, gettin’ bombarded by
bull-shit spillin’ outta th’ mouths a
people talkin’ ‘bout shit ain’t related ta Now.
An’ I’m backed in ta a corner, jus’
tryin’ ta get back to that fleshy core of
Soul-singin’Jazz-swingin’Bebop-verse...

I worked my way back over your chassis,
rusted it out ‘till it fell the fuck off –
an’ now, I’m livin’ in your tailpipe.

Tha exhaust I’s suckin’ in burns me inside-out,
an’ I gotta stawt cuttin’ fingers off
so leprotic diseases of ya dead conceits an’ forms
can’t work their way up inta my veins…

If you’re wonderin’ why I’m so dark, it’s ‘cause I live in your tailpipe,
but if you wonder why I’m so black, it’s ‘cause I can’t figya out
how to move out
of yo’ motherfuckin’ tailpipe.

Poisoned

I.

it's a myth that smoke rises
down here, it's all i can smell.
everyone's exhaust is trapped down here
and it purples the skin around my eyes.
worse than that, i've become used
to breathing these toxins: lies about
where you were last night, knock-down
all night fights about the necklace
you gave to your T.A., weepings
over the toilet, cursing the pregnancy test makers,
shuffling of knees on carpet in your attempt
to naturally abort. the lies we tell ourselves as we lie
collapsed against brick from too many street drugs,
whirring blood struggling to escape vein
pounds against temples,
beckons the whisper of a blade to release it into air
where it can be red, where it can be alive,
vibrant, where it can become part of the concrete's
memory, permanent, a maroon stain
indistinguishable from the dark drippings of dumpsters.

New Content Coming Soon!

Hi folks!

So, here's the reason behind all the posting delays. I am in the process of locking up a group of writers willing to do interviews with me that will be posted on the blog! I won't give away any surprises, but these folks are some of the most impressive authors and poets I have had the fortune to encounter. If all goes well, the first of the interviews will be up by the 20th of October. That being said, there will be sporadic poems being posted throughout the next few weeks. I apologize for the delays. I promise these interviews will make up for it.

Thank you all for visiting the site and sharing the URL with your friends. I normally don't work for free, but for you guys it's a labor of love, so I don't mind. Ever.

More to come!

No poems today

Hi folks,

There wasn't a poem posted on Friday or today because I was celebrating my fiancee's 28th birthday over the weekend, and we had too much fun. After going to a wall-to-wall trampoline facility and drinking too much Fireball whiskey, I'm currently too hungover to edit poems and I'm rehabbing my lower back with some yoga stretches and bananas. Once I can sit at the computer for more than a couple minutes without a back spasm, I'll post some new poems. Hope y'all have a happy Monday.

-A.L.J.

Steps (Don't Look Back)

Step one is circumstance
and knowing the difference
between the hallway you just got out of
and the long climb ahead. My advice,
forget where you came from - it can only haunt you
if you look back.

God of Morning

A man stands at the edge
of a river that appeared seemingly
overnight. However sourceless,
it moves east to west
following the downward slant
of concrete along the walking path.
The ants are living on borrowed time,
their dry refuge disappears into the river,
scraps of lives are swept downstream
and pour out into a wide field, green
and unfathomable, depthless.
A hand on his robed hip says I thought
this might happen. There is yet more work
left to be done.

Nomadic Tongue

I pass from one moment to the next thinking only of food, of sustenance and of creation. I dream of creating new flavors, searching cupboard and grocery aisles for sharp spice profiles, rounded bellies of sweet miracles yet unbirthed from oven. What better way to experience a country, a people, a past, a future but through the tongue, the teeth, through the dissolution of protein bonds and amino acids, through saliva. To experience cooked flesh of fish transformed to butter as it moves across ridges on roof of mouth, to digest in the fading sunlight, silhouettes of powerlines merging with mountains purpled by the passage of another day. It is a psalm, it is prayer, it is the denial of death, the truest form of faith.

More (Letters to an unborn son)

There has to be a whisper
of song in your soul
something greater (palm
leaves swaying kiss of
a sudden chilly wind
wet slap of flesh meeting flesh)

We are all more
than our obituaries (a brief pause
on our long traverse infinite)
and our regrets. We are more
than that last kiss
you wish you'd given them more
than our paychecks our alignment
our position in space.

The universe of your fingertips
your eyes is more. More
than this more
than anything can be
because it ekes from your soul
but
you can't take it with you
it belongs to us all.

Removed Content

Hi, folks.

Thanks to everyone who has visited the site this month, I know I haven't been as consistent as of late - I appreciate your loyalty. And a special Thank You to anyone who has read and thought about my mini-rant on the "Criticism & Rants" page - I haven't been that productively incensed in a while.

All apologies going out to my weekly visitors for the missed weeks of poems - I've been sick for two weeks and haven't been able to sit at the computer between fighting the infection and my work schedule.

Let's get to the point. In order to cover my ass in terms of publishing rights I will be removing a select few poems from the site. As of today, I am submitting "The Dadaist Professor" and "Something Borrowed" to The Round Up - a literary e-zine that publishes essays, short stories and poetry - and those poems will not be visible on the site.

In order to have poems published elsewhere, I must give The Round Up exclusive rights to whatever I submit for a 60 day period. I will be adding them to my list of blogs I'm following so you have the opportunity to read my poems there, should they be accepted.

Once that passes, however, I plan on re-posting them to the site and if the poems aren't accepted, I will re-post them immediately. As I submit more poems to other contests and publishers, poems will disappear, but I will post another one of these messages to notify you of whether or not the poems will reappear, and at what date.

I hope you're all in good health and spirits. Wish me luck.

Your part-time webmaster and neighborhood angry black man,

A.L.J.

A friend of a past lover once read my palm

She was handing them out to everyone on our dormitory floor
and I was one of the last to arrive at her door. She said
I had a long life line, but splintered, reaching out at points.
She said I would have two children, but I wouldn't know when
or with whom.

Out on the back patio before the sun rose and warmed the tiles
I gazed, half awake at my hands and tried to remember
which lines she read, which lines would tell me which lover
would be the one to help me achieve a mortal's immortality. I tried to read
which line would tell me that my child's face would be light, like my mother's
or have my father's midnight skin. I tried to parse the one that would tell me
I would live to see my child grow up and find love as I did.

I knew the woman dozing upstairs would be there with me
for the awful times, for the bewildering times, for the moments our child
would surprise us both. And I hoped she was dreaming
of the life we were yet to witness, burgeoning inside her.

PSA

Well, folks, Zimmerman was found innocent of second degree murder. In your closeted rage and wishes of ill-will towards him, know this about Zimmerman's life after this trial:

For the rest of his life, Zimmerman will have to wonder if the next corner he rounds will be his last - whether it's in prison or on the street. I'm pretty sure the Universe's system of checks and balances will sort this one out for everyone that's as disgusted as I am. Our tax dollars at work, people: folks with marijuana offenses get 3 years, a prison record and not even half a shot at a comfortable life when they get out, child murderers get to move in on your block and watch your kids.

I've never felt less safe in my own country... Well that's a lie - I've never felt safe in this country. The drones and the NSA/Verizon spy service and the tactics employers use get around Obamacare and a workforce made of minimum wage earners has just kind of tipped the scales for me.

Sorry, there will be no poem tomorrow. The bile in my throat has stripped my voice raw.

Monitored, planning a prison break,
A.L.J.

Stratagems for linking together poems in a collection

1.
Maintain, keep it
steady, measured and
stay the course. Ignore
the hail and wind, the gale
upon the sea cannot cast
you off too far - push on.

2.
There comes a time
to stop writing - or publishing
at least. There comes a time when
what you have to say is best said
in the quiet hours, quiet hours
that are quickly dying out.

3.
That burning place
where your lung feels like it's imploding, that
sensation of wildfire in San Diego -
throw yourself upon it, into it
let your heart and brain
cinder.

4.
This saturation - horror-vaccui
vacuum of horror, a terror
with an open maw devouring.
Drips of paint, sulphur, super
heated flesh melts across canvas
then flash freezes, inert,
and rots.

5.
Read lotus sutras
at night.
Speak
like a child.

Charlie's Blues (in E Major)

He listened to her wash at the sink,
& feigned sleep when she returned.

She was already dressed,
& wore a perfume

that was absent from her body
the night before.

She did not look back
as the door closed,

as the stairs vanished
behind her heels.

From his window,
he watched her hail a taxi.

She seemed new, full of breath
& light.

Her legs disappeared
into the backseat &,

for an instant,
he wished that he had stopped her…

The image of her tears
laid wet on his mind,

& as the cab turned the corner,
he wondered if he had the capacity
to forget what could have been.

Charlie's Blues (in E Major)

At his apartment
they sat sipping drinks on opposite sides
of the small room.

She asked how he’d ended upon that stage,
behind the piano.

He explained that Schroeder died
with a needle in his arm & that,
every night,
Charlie wanted his playing
to let Schroeder live again.

She asked if he had heard
from her brother.
She said she hadn’t spoken to him
since he dropped out of college
and vanished.

She said that her search for him
could not go on much longer.

He moved closer but said nothing,
finished his drink & looked through the glass,
the floorboards distorting
as he rolled it between his palms.

She gritted her teeth & looked away…

Their lovemaking was not passionate,
but there was a moment
when they locked eyes, each
trying to understand the other’s

need, perhaps, for release,
an escape.
An escape from memory & pain,
an escape only found
in one brief
ecstatic
moment.

Charlie's Blues (in E Major)

He finished his beer in gulps.
His set had been a long one,

& the air in the room had become wet
with the sweat of bodies that danced.

As he stood to leave, he heard a voice he had,
at times, attempted to forget.

Her squared jaw & midnight curls
had remained the same,
but he scarcely recognized her
otherwise.

There was an air about her.

There was distress
& frustration
in the way she moved across the room –

stiff movements brought on
by long nights of driving, of

trying to reach a destination
not on the map.

Her eyes were ringed with a lonesomeness
he only saw in the corners of women’s eyes
after he paid them.

She saw that the stringy hair
of his childhood

had finally filled out,
& that he had grown tall.

His face had thinned, & the fingers
she once called pudgy and infantile

had become long vines that could conjure
wild forests of sounds –

he looked as though
life had hammered him
into the form of someone

she should have been afraid
of talking to.

Thank You

I would just like to say thank you to everyone who's visited the site since I revamped it in February. I'm so happy that my little corner of the world has been entertaining enough thus far, and I hope to bring some new content to the site once the blog reaches 1000+ hits.

This week I'll be posting the poem that launched a thesis back in the winter of 2009. It's a long poem, so I'm breaking it up into three posts and they will all share the same heading. I hope you enjoy "Charlie's Blues (In E Major)".

Yours, but never owned,

A.L.J.

Is this...?

I.

This is not the burnt out bulbs
behind lonely windows,

drawn curtains.

This is not frost that spiderwebs
across reflections,

fractures faces…

This is not dim memory of smells:
patchouli lovemakings & rivulets of tears –

a certain dampness.

This is not clenched buttock
or moist skin,

synapses tattered by ecstasy.

This is not a dark mark of shattered capillaries, this
is not sweat on your breast

or yielding flesh

or the electric taste of blood.

This is not green memory,
or the lover dissipated, their smell

evaporating from the bed you shared –
& this is not a rib dislodged,

wandering in skin –

this is not crimson regret…


II.

This is a thin sliver of morning,
silver baths of light –

visions transcribed
from pages of slow wandering.

This is shallow brushstrokes
layered over blanched canvas,

this is bright air & buoyant clouds
forgotten in dark winters.

This is a giddy wind
sweeping up another hat,

& this is the hand in yours
still cold from walking…

This is the song that vibrates
in the hollows of ears

long after it has ended –
this is simple melody.

This is the sun almost blotted out
by trees exploding with Spring –

this is light filtered
through veined palms…

This is a thought of departure
abandoned – these are quiet moments at home.

This is laundry day – hangers swaying on the rod
waiting to be laden with clothing.

& this is the smell of your bedroom,
that lingers in the fabric of old shirts…


III.

No, this is not manifesto;
this is morning breath.

No, this is not crippling fear;
this is hair, not yet dry & fragrant.

No, this is not timid caresses in a dull September;
this is the subtle heat of another body, shuddering…

This is the bad cooking eaten
because it is there.

This is the smell of coffee already half-gone
because you were late to rise.

This is the flicker of eyelids
& the constriction of irises…


Is this love?

Giving You the Business (Everything Must Go)

There ain't a thing you can do about your death, but there's something to be done about the road there. You can choose to travel over glass shards, let your tires slowly deflate, or go off roading in ditches full of oven and dishwasher carcasses, an elephant graveyard for outmoded technology. You can choose to use the scythe at your side or follow the ruts that deepen with each passerby. It is a delusion that the road has no memory. The act of observation changes the observed. The road never forgets. It outlives you, your generations.

You can choose to settle for comfort or to drive with the top down through a hailstorm, laughing. And who will protect you out there? Whose hands will pull you from the jaws of the death of your career as unassisted lanspeed record holder, when your leg's trapped under the chassis that slipped from the grip of the tire jack? Who'll be there to help you laugh it off or feed you your medications when the cancer finally overtakes your ability to regenerate throat lung and cervical cells? Who indeed? Who in deed will make you forget that this life is brutish and short? You can choose. The pendulum forever swings away from you. Grab its singular, weighted huevos and ride.

As I Lie Waking

Since I arrived here, I have had the same dream - of a desert at night, lit only by blue moonlight, endlessly cold and noisy with the sound of trumpets. Pianos cut their strings and make love to the air in melodies only heard by cautious mice. There is always danger there, underneath the dunes, something waiting to give way underneath my feet and a fall deeper into what I imagine is a love, inescapable.

Technical Difficulties

My apologies, folks. The wireless router at home burnt out, but I've got two poems to make up for the delay. Hope you enjoy.

Yours,

A.L.J.

Post Partem

daisy stems are worked
into the braids that wreathe
my lover's head. She is scented
like lilacs drowned
in flame.

in the corner
she yearns
for a spiderweb swept away
on a current of air, cradling
a sonogram picture.
where the spider has gone
we will never know.

News Post

The site has reached its 500+ hits! Thank you to everyone that's visited! I've been working on poems sporadically, but I haven't had the time and dedication to finalize them. When I have a polished poem for you folks, I will post it, but I'm only one man. Maybe I should hire an intern to edit my poems...

Anyway, I'll see how badly my Thursday-Friday work schedule kicks my ass - if I am not totally burnt out by then, you all should see a poem on Friday.

Thanks again to everyone!


Your underground sound,

A.L.J.

On the I-5

The sun sets over the retainment wall,
some shade for the pilgrims who've left the safety
of their air conditioning to get a better look at the reason
their night's plans have been delayed.

Still silhouettes of palms look ablaze through the waves
rising off the freeway. Inching forward in my '89 Oldsmobile,
in between spraying water on my legs, I notice fresh patches
of cinderblock along the wall. They mark other places and times
where lives have been altered.

The wall becomes a close relative to those lost, it
remembers them. It remembers how its face was scarred, changed.
It remembers the lost, their entrance and exit from its life
and how brief that time was.

In Tangiers

Our footprints in the tiles
are imperceptable unless it rains, and until then
we seven are but ghosts lighting candles,
tracing the movement of banana tree roots
and the migration of birds. Our authority, our domain
is the rising and setting of the sun,
the goings on in between morning rush hour
and evening rush hour but nothing more.

The night belongs to those lovers
on the other side of the wall, and to the landlord,
always listening for evidence of his keep
spending their coins on clothing, on food, on old magic
that makes us fall out of the walls
and into his view.

The lovers are safe in their love. I know
exactly who you are - you are mine.
Nothing will change that is a sharp whisper
in ther aftermath of skin and sweat. It cuts the night
and spiderwebbs the inside of my brain
with wanting, desire for something I too
can keep for my own.

Lust for Life

Crocheted fingers
of scarves tickle skin
behind my ears, pressed
against the wall.
I don't have the slightest idea
of who you are tumbles
out of a mouth next door.
There are low murmurs, then laughter
as their two mouths meet,
and part, and meet,
and part.

All Apologies (A News Post)

Hi folks,

It's been a rough couple weeks for me - my own family drama and my wife's family drama came to a head, and there's probably more to come - but I'm back with some new poems and a partially filled well of creative ideas to pull from for the next month. Thank you to all of you who've visited the site since it went silent - I promise not to let it happen too often.

In any case, I've got two new poems I'm posting today since I won't get to edit poems this weekend and I work on Monday morning. They are part of a sequence, but I'm not sure how long it'll become. Hope you enjoy "Lust for Life" and "In Tangiers".

Respect and Love,
Your Drugged-out Newscaster,

A.L.J.

From your local neighborhood wannabe ex-pat

No poem today. My black rage is too strong. Pray for our country that believes lying to its citizens is the way, and human rights are disposable products. Now my site's being monitored by the federal government. Up yours, Feds.


Incensed,

A.L.J.

P.S.- http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-passes-cispa-cybersecurity-bill-2013-4#ixzz2QrSge400

Perennial

The night blooms.
Shadows follow
the red wane of sundown,

the air darkens, becomes saturated
with pollen. Still,
thoughts of you

invade he hollows
of my head.

When the moon is all too present against the panes,
I watch the garden waver –
I watch it fill with even more life, movement.

I watch the tulips’ stems bend,
their petals kiss the faces
of their neighbors, the irises –

the ones we planted in fall,
trying to outrun the frost.

I try to ignore the plot of asters
you made me agree to plant

after you were diagnosed.
Out of duty, an unshakeable
obligation, I tend them.

I tend them because, in my dreams,
you are the camellia’s scent – present,
though barely perceptible.

The Evening Stock begin to shrink inward
as light stretches the lines of their shadows.

Daytime insects stir –
they loop and circle
in the air above your garden.

You are in my memory, still, amid the off-white sheets –
there is light, the slow rhythm of your breathing,
and the heart monitor

chirping intermittently.

Po' Folk Blues

Our complaints,
our lust for $10 an hour,
our hunger,
never satisfied.

In the small space of the courtyard
just a small patch of grass:
there are broken bottles,
fingernails,
a near-death past.

In everything that passes:
our overflowing streets,
our daily transactions,
in the exhaust from buses,
our hunger is sharpened.

Our fathers leave no wills,
cool rain does not fall on us,
& our war is unseen,
though already declared.

In that small space
between pillars of brick and glass,
we gorge on the past,
gnaw our broken fingernails,
break more bottles
& sharpen our knives.

We who wear masks,
we who miss, who remember,
we who speak in whispers,
we who have nothing
are waiting.

Our watches bought in Union Square
are always broken, never wind,
the rent is always due, but can't be paid,
the showerheads drip rust-water
& the last train downtown
has left the station -

it is full to capacity with pale visitors.

They cannot see us.
Our knives are ready.

We are waiting.

Future Blues

I apologize for the delay in posting, but I have a good reason. That being that $176 per paycheck not only doesn't cover my bills, it doesn't even put socks on my feet or food in my fiancee's belly. So I've been scavenging for extra work this week and trying not to just throw up my hands, say "Fuck it!", and leave the country. I brought that up to say this: How many years do you think America has before it ends up like North Korea? Check out this article (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-lousy-life-north-korea-135740771.html) and think hard about the similarities. Try and assess whether you're among the "elite" class or the so-called "middle" (which, really, hasn't existed in this country for years). If you're in a similar situation, hit me up in the comments to this post.

Today/Friday's poem is an imitation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Middle Class Blues". Hope you enjoy.

Seasons (On Loss)

i.
Have you ever tasted yellow?
Smelt a tango? Seen lithe song?
Touched cherries’ flavor
or heard the sweet pop of smoky scents,
the warm approach of roses,
or the hot-house jazz of autumn?

ii.
Have you ever smelt black ice
or touched the white of snow?
Heard oatmeal’s scent creep through a cold house or
seen numbness under knitted gloves?
Have you ever tasted the air around the kids outside,
with their snowballs and sweat soaked snow pants?
Or tasted the warmth melting their fingers as they sip chocolate after the battle?

iii.
Have you ever touched March or heard all the locks
unlock, letting in the new air? Tasted a daisy
or the bitter Please forget me
at the end of her note
at the foot of the bed?
Have you ever smelt distilled spirits of leaves and sunlight?
Have you ever seen regret?
Seen a pregnant mind aborting lines and revisiting past mistakes?
Or seen the touch of your letters, crisp,
with no return address?

iv.
Have you ever seen the sizzle
of a Latina’s New York pulse or tasted the screams and shouts
of street children playing in a spraying fire hydrant?
Touched the rolling curves of heat rising from the street and
heard the stop sign’s red and white scream, melt, and drip
into the underground midnight sewer?
Have you ever smelt the Caribbean grandmother’s stare inquire
about the tan-lines around your finger?
Have you ever smelt her thinking, pitying?
Smelt her sad smile forced onto the surface
of her farm-field face,
smelt the tears you wouldn’t let rise
as you politely smiled back?

v.
Have you ever heard the wind rustling the browning leaves?
Have you ever heard the cold crack of the moon rising –
the sound of a heart breaking?
Have you ever heard the rain soak the half-frozen ground,
making it pregnant as spring?
Have you ever watched the youth die out of a flower,
burnt blood-purple above the hearth?
Have you ever smelt your own stale, dry smell,
the result of too many showers?
Have you tasted your own blood?
Have you ever tasted your own blood after chewing your lip
as you take down her favorite books –
books you can’t read anymore?

September

Noon's slow hemorrhage
into sundown.

These brief rays
chilled, cloaked
in grey.

Sorrow
is not its first name -

shame colors
the jerk of chains, air
wounded by shouts, wails.

Everything is broken, here -

dry eyes, distances bridged
by consoling hands.

Warm ghosts bargain, here,
for their memories,
for a loss that is theirs
alone.

What we are able to keep
are scant remembrances -
a face, a laugh, an address
we can never revisit -

only what is weightless
and green.

Family Time

No poem today and probably Monday as well, folks. I'm sorry, but I have to take care of some things today with family and Easter's on Sunday, so I don't think I'll be able to give y'all what you're looking for on this blog. Have an awesome weekend and a great Good Friday.

Drawn and quartered,

A.J.

Supergirl Takes a Day Off (Part 2)

It seems a shame that not one famous work of art
can hold my attention, but I can sit here in my sweatpants
on-the-verge-of-tears-laughing at dogs with eyebrows drawn on them.
The people on this planet who imagine they have
a heightened sense of things, their work seems... incomplete.
There is so much ego and too little attention to what's important.
The one artist whose work I can actually enjoy is Bryan Saunders.
This guy's done every drug imaginable and painted self portraits
under their influence. I tried LSD once.
My body processed the chemicals too quickly, but I felt
what could be called fear, if only for a moment.

Clark called and left a message on my machine. It must have been
while I considered the benefits of spending my small allowance
on Captain Morgan or the extra large jug of Carlos Rossi.
I wonder which side of the family he gets his need to be right from.
Clark never takes a day off. Even on his days off
he drags me to events he thinks will make me feel more compassionate
towards humans. Sometimes it does help, seeing them come together
to change the spirit of a neglected neighborhood with a public garden or
reading about charities that make a dying kid's wish come true.
But his sense of justice is too fairy tale for my taste.
I can't say he doesn't, that we don't, do good on this world
but you can't save everyone. And you can't stop the brutal things
that these creatures do to one another, to themselves.
It seems like the moment we intervened here
human nature itself began to change. The people we save
are beginning to look harder, twisted by their past,
something we can never save them from.
Clark and I have saved lives but I wonder
just what kind of lives do we send them back to.
Would Clark's sense of justice waver
if he saw one of his saved beat someone to death?
If one of his saved committed suicide, what then of right and wrong?
Not knowing how he'd answer, I deleted his message, sight unseen,
and picked up the receiver.

Supergirl Takes a Day Off (part 1)

At least it's raining today. There was a bus crash
on a mountain highway not in any way designed to handle a bus that size.
I turned the TV off before they announced the number of dead.
I could have flown over the clouds, above the rain and listened
for the bus to make the turn, for the sound of hydroplaning rubber,
for the vibrations of the bus scraping the metal barricade, for the moment
the barricade gave way to too much weight.

Even though my legs don't tire on this planet
I don't think I ever paid much attention to how far away
the supermarket was, the liquor store even farther
on days like these. I could fly to Detroit and back,
with enough time to get a Coney Dog, in the time it took me
to pick up milk and chocolate syrup. A news article said
that twenty minutes of cardiovascular exercise will release
as much endorphins as a chocolate bar, but sitting at the kitchen counter
drinking my chocolate, I disagree.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother saving these animals.
Clark can be such a pussy, with all his "Everyone deserves
to be happy" bullshit. Earlier, on the bus, when that pig grabbed my ass
I could have broken his hand into minute pieces.
I could have stopped the bus, held it over my head
and brought it down on his face, over and over.
I slapped him instead and grabbed him by the testes and asked him
How does it feel? He probably enjoyed that part,
that humiliation. Deep down, maybe that's what he wanted.

Happy Hangover Day

I know I usually have a poem up before noon, but I was...scratch that. I still AM hungover and kind of sick again. Fun times. I'll post something less creepy/disturbing on Friday, but for now please enjoy the product of me editing a poem when I'm drunk: "The Man in Unit 4-C".


Dizzily yours,

A.J. the Ulcer

The Man in Unit 4-C

He is composing his opus, his overture
as he snips the piano wires and stretches animal sinew

across warm wooden bodies. Like his neighbors,
he has always wondered what inhabits that other side of the wall.

Curiousity devours each resident's mind, eventually, and
they can't help but wonder What is he DOING in there? What

IS all that noise? Thin walls of the complex make their question
a defining aspect of the space itself, and it's almost cannonical

for tenants to move in next door or across the hall,
as if proximity would let them make sense

of the screams.

Tuesday Sutra (Laundry, Baseball and Underemployment)

It's a funny masquerade
of patterns that float in Santa Ana breezes.

You couldn't tell, today, that just last week
the landscape was an asphalt floodplain.

Clothes on the line and exhibition games
of baseball on too many days off
in between shifts is my normal.

When I heard the bard say twenty years
of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift
I thought it was the Truth, but I never imagined
what he was saying would be true for me.

When I was just a child, maybe
I didn't have much imagination, not a clue
what my future would be; all I had
was a desperate drive. I did not know
I was racing forward, towards death
with such abandon, not knowing how I would wish
I could slow down, linger and savor my twenties.

I am not yet a man, though I ought to be.

Perhaps that is the point.

Maybe the clothes should sway a while longer,
the baseball season should never start
and my time between shifts ought to be long, droll
and filled with echoes.

When you hit bottom, send me a postcard

I'd like to know what yours looks like. I can't remember it all but I know I just don't fit in out here among eighty-six-looking fifty-five-year-olds, already on their way out. Their ghosts won't stop chattering. They persist so that they won't dissipate, so they'll continue to exist somewhere in someone's inner ear. I just don't fit in out here. My mind moves too fast and my body too slow to keep pace with these songs written for hunchbacked children with too little clothing on and even less input on the world of false promises they'll inherit from their Boomer parents. I just don't fit in out here. I just don't fit in... Stamped down ire pushes up through sediment each morning, lighters clasped and middle fingers raised to burn my small happinesses to the ground and scatter the cinders. It is easier to be dumb, to be led. Alcoholic recall catches in the sky nightly, brings with it carcasses of other nights, nights spent in hallways full of the stink of fresh linoleum and lingering aroma of boiled cabbage and fish sauce. It brings with it brief images of eyes clutched by words unspoken: Please! Do something! Help me! Please... and slow waltzing to the flurries of cocaine in their heads, her limp wrists and unsure hips wreathed in something smoldering just out of view.

My wife takes my hand as the first volley hits

~after Edward Kienholz's "The Portable War Memorial"

In waking dreams I climb unreal mountains of pallid skin
and curl my body into ecstatic positions
of worship and reverence and despair.

I watch the flag of divine right, destiny
manifested in starlight patchwork,
raze the capitals of countries and kingdoms.

I watch and I listen.

I watch and I listen
for the era of war, of error,
to end.

I watch and I listen
for the perfumes of bombed alleyways
to find their way home, for streets so flooded
with bodies of the displaced.

I can only hope that the aluminum faces
of partisan leaders will one day crumple
into weeping.

I can only hope that their wrought-iron backs
will bend in embraces, that their copper hearts
will oxidize and bleed Lorca’s green love.

I can only ask that you, too,
watch and listen

for breath
for swelling
for wind pregnant with hope.

Center of the Universe (Collapse of a Star)

The concrete bruised flesh of the homeless, frozen and black, thousands
on the brilliant streets of the center of the old universe protesting their status
as economic rape victims, cradling paystubs and shitting on cop cars,
dictatorships and African post-aparthied empires disbanded like so many gangs,
hunted down, and executed. In these future times of holograph phones
and rusted chassies of American-made indentured servitude to our new god, Debt,
I find my thoughts occupied by what it means to write, to feel, to be a Poet,
holiness or something like it and I have to scold my mind for such departures
from what is going on around me. But sometimes you have to move far
from where you once started, light years, sometimes you must abandon one center
and find a new one untethered by time. I don't recognize myself in the mirror
or in old poems. The future and the past are in the same room, but
they have nothing to say to one another. There were so many centers,
identities, blasphemies and loves left on the wayside to what I am now - physical
but not physic, unexpressive and sublimely lonely. And yet these things I've left behind do not define me.

New Schedule, Writing Projects, New Blog

Hi guys,

As I said, March will be the month of fewer posts and (hopefully) higher quality poems. From here on out, I will update this blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. If I work late on those days, I will post something for you all the next day (along with, maybe, a bonus poem). I've got to turn my hustle-mode up to eleven this month so I can find a job I was trained for and start saving for the wedding next year. I'll try not to let the site suffer.

I've been half-assedly shopping my chapbook/broadside/collection of poems around, and I'm glad you've been enjoying the outtakes. I've come down with some kind of sickness, so I didn't get a chance to write anything new this weekend, but I'm posting a poem that does appear in the collection. I'll probably sprinkle in some more of them throughout March's updates.

And an old friend from graduate school, Nick Gaudio, let me know he had a blog that he updates with some degree of frequency. It's called "American Quixotic" and if you're alright stepping outside your comfort level, as I'm sure the readers of this blog are, I'm sure you'll really enjoy Nick's work. You can click on the link embedded here or click the one to the right under "My Blog List".

Thanks to everyone who visited the site last month and I hope you all stay tuned - there should be an "Interview" page coming down the pike.

Sincerely infected,

A.J.

A Garden State of Mind

1.

Ignore the numb in your fingers, deny
the cold authority of the fire inside
(if you're not careful, it will consume you)
You borrow guitars not knowing
if you’ll ever return them, you beg for change
in liquor store aisles to feed the fire just enough
to keep it smoldering, you drink
too much black coffee at night just
to get the lightning out
(you can forget so much in an instant)
You take a beating here, but
you can’t create something
if it comes easy
(nothing worth a damn, anyway)

2.

This was how we all grew up.
This is how we make it:
in the streets,
in the rain gutters choked
with rotten leaves, between shifts
riding the bus beside bangers and old folks,
living on our in-laws' couches and skating by
on sixty bucks per paycheck.

We make it without fear
of bill collectors
(This call is to collect a debt...
Get bent)
We make it without guilt
(a friend once said if you’re looking back
you ain’t moving forward, that’s for sure)
We make something of it
because the alternative is extinguishment,
that slow death by asphyxiation
in a rainbow of polyester blends
and aloha patterned ties on Fridays.

You have to have something
to grab a hold of, something
worth fighting for even
when you've got nothing left to lose.

Poem 2 (Odysseus)

You have such a funny perspective on things.
You think that there is some private conversation going on,
and someone was supposed to pull you aside and tell you
what to do, when, really, you are the one who decides what’s important.
You decide what you want your history to be.

Dogs barking, odd textures
of music and layers of graffiti.
Rooftops and smokestacks.
I have always grown up
next to freeways and crackhouses
but I never knew, growing up,
why my friends wouldn’t want to come over
and stay the night, why I would always have to go
to their homes. It was normal.
Folks from around my way
just look a certain way. It’s normal.

Say it loud...

I am a man without people. I am
No One, Incognito in black skin.
I am whinnying needle
galloping in vein,
I am bad trip incarcerated in flesh.
I long to merge with all other
like kind, by-product of brain-matter
is no exception -
I lust for all flesh.

Traditions

Poem 1 (war)

And Lynn asked me, through the smoke and brief distance,
What do you want to do for Christmas?
and I could only think of how war and abandonment
are how my family always celebrated the holiday.
There was a river, and a road that wound along cliff faces,
guard rails glinting in their silver patchwork of scales.
Walking up to the river itself, peering around figures,
warmth of awe and admiration that poured from skins
cut the cold. As the skiff made landfall, George Washington
waved across the breadth, teeming with ice flows,
faces turned from the reenactment, pride dissipating
to nostalgia. My parent’s bodies herded me, gently,
towards the car, their faces flat, having experienced this
as a distraction, an airing.

1a. (the lies we tell our hearts, bodies)

I suggested we bake Christmas cookies.
I shared this same tradition with Alice one winter.
I was on break from college, enamored, and lonely.
I remember how soft her hips were, like Lynn’s,
but less graceful. By the Monday I was due back at work, and
in between smoking weed, Screwdrivers and mid-day fuckings,
we had decorated ninety-eight.

Outtakes Week

This week, I would like to post poems that were once part of a writing project which I've been shopping around for the last few months. I'm calling the project "The Basement Tapes", but it has little to do with Bob Dylan & The Band and more about the vantage from a basement. I hope you guys enjoy, and I'm sorry for the missed day last week. I'll have some new poems for you all starting in March, along with a modified update schedule.

Post-Modern Alterations on the Buddha's Teachings (The Four Ignoble Truths)

1.

Always failing always losing always weeping
always sleeping off
the always present, endless amazement
and disgust:

small alterations
on the Buddha’s teachings:
Ouroboros locked in perpetual motion, Samsara,
that unmoving vehicle of Mahayana and Theravada;
their lotus lungs are drowned in combustion.

Smoke that never clears the system
always taking always making
love to the idea of endings – that blatant lie
on the tips of tonight and tongues and
this blind blade against your throat.

Scimitar of wind pressed
against eyes bleeding tears – acid carving paths
down your cheeks into ether – ever-flowing –
that smashes white
on the never-blue shore.

2.

Always praising never shaking
always slaving away for never slaked thirst
for quiet epiphanies and clarity –

that crumbled neon in the veins of amphetamine Venus,
forever fishnetted with injection wounds, pregnant
with sadness and

fears that bleed out of paper:
the cobweb capillaries of an attic
that houses a Caliban devouring lightbulbs,
its maw enveloping skies
of perfume.

That insulate of disconnected cables
that once joined jaw and skull,
synapse and electricity – the circuit
that’s been closed.

3.

Always wooden always named
always ashen, but never contained within
the words on the page – never breathing,
always aging behind the fleshy petals

of eyelids always darkened
but never closed – dyings caught
on the edges of lashes,

that passes through the small
of a needles eye – your eye – and punctures
unnamed stranger’s ears.

4.

Never trade end-stopped echoes
for bayonets and gunpowder –
re-verb-erations are more effective
in times of roses.

Always scamper and scuttle
along the bottoms of gutters
filled with blood, but never ask why,
why the manhole cover has been welded shut.

Nothing pro-found is anti-found in the navel
of a woman or child, but do not covet their bodies –
covet their capacity for ripping open the seams
of your desires.

Continue dreaming of eyeballs
wrapped in burlap and red paper,
lumpy packages bound with twine,
of love and of nights
when it goes un-found.

And if you are consistent,
if you never falter in your conviction
that we are all convicts conscripted
to walk all night to gallows the next morning,
then you will be able to peel back your third eyelid,
disassemble eight-lane highways,
and sup from pools of beauty,
of horror.

Dream Week

"The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay." - Ben Whishaw, I'm Not There

116th Dream

What keeps me coming back to this place
are the frayed nerves under my skull,
the mercury thinness in my veins.

I need to know
how many times
must I watch Eve stroke the hair of Samael
as he weeps into her breast “It’s my fault – forgive me.”
See the moon cupped in the hands of a blind man
with a noose around his neck,
Ophelia standing in the mouth of a giant clam,
her sallow neck draped in pearls.
Watch the mouths of children fill with dead petals
falling from a shattered window of sky,
Little Red Riding Hood broken and naked,
victimized.
How many times
must I find my sister standing
outside our family home,
its skeleton smoldering, her nightgown singed,
her face, eyeless…
The silhouettes of angels making love,
a clown without makeup,
women with sad complexions,
each bearing a different shade of midnight,
a fire-pump that pulses
in place of a heart and lung…

This alley has the same sour drafts
that come from nowhere,
the graffiti and eroded bricks
that all the others have,
but each time I pass it,
I feel as though something’s vanished,
as if a sound had dissolved
a moment before my arrival.

And though my pace quickens
when I approach it, I fear
what I might see
should I arrive
too soon…

Posting delay

So it's been seven days without a day off, and that has really cut into my update/posting/web manager timetable. I'll post something new tomorrow, but I'm positive that February will be the end of my 3x a week updates. Thanks for those of you who've visited the site.

Your festering ulcer and schizoid one-man-jazz-band,

A.J.

from "Sixteen Ways of Looking at Streetcorners"

i.

Cool liquid sipped
past a woman’s lips
flush with summer.
To see them kissed
would be a disgrace.

A man’s gaze
of lust and want
is some safe prodding,
probing, if
concealed by distance.

The round of breasts
stretches white fabric
and draws male attention
from across the street, yet

under an awning,
dark circles under a boy’s eyes,
darken further – I wonder
why?


ii.

In a corner of sky
wreathed in grey clouds,
the color of stratosphere filters
through slow moving wind –

the sway of purple flowers
releases a tart perfume
that delights my nose,
but tears at my eyes.

Silver arms of a clock
perpetually spin.
The sound of the bell's
crescendos splash and

a stop sign’s authority
wanes
as each season passes.

iii.

Blasphemy, to me,
is making love in too much clothing –
it chokes, condemns flesh
to craving,
unslakeable thirst.

There are reflections
in the false eyes of passing faces,
in black lenses devoid of laughter –
they make us both seem
so remote.

Street sounds are indiscernible
from the overhead speakers’
Bebop discord.
Are you even listening?

Blunt edges of sound:
scrape of concrete
on iron chair vacated
before coffee could be served.
Muted notes
in the bodies of a basses,
on the tongues of trumpets.

American Sentences

This form of sorts was developed by New Jersey's own Allen Ginsberg. The form is Ginsberg's interpretation of the haiku form into a very straightforward and open, or "American", form: One sentence, seventeen syllables. While I have written over one hundred of these things, I mostly use them as building blocks for longer poems, and which I've applied directly in the poem coupled with this post. It's actually a synthesis of Frank O'Hara's "Lunch poems" and Ginsberg's American Sentences. I hope you enjoy.

P.S. - Sorry for the late updates. For the rest of February I'll do my best to post on time, but as I get busier with work and if I find a second job, I'll have to revisit my update schedule. Thanks everyone who has listened in on my little corner of the world. You're the best.

Sympathy - After Francis Bacon's "Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef"

Is it agony or fear or disgust which haunts your face?
What is it that has stripped your mouth of its gums
and stitched to your back bloody, ribbed wings?

Marooned in hallways perfectly black and limitless,
do you sense regret?
Was it you who severed ligaments
that joined happiness to your heart?

Or is it our hearts that pump glass shards through veins,
inner darkness flooding our own hallways?
Is it our eyes that have been stripped of color, varnish,
oil? Are we numb to our own wings? Will our wingbeats
shudder the air around madness and propel us?

Will we ascend to your vacant seat or will we find some brief light
in the golden mouth of your absent horn?

Not a sonnet

Today's poem is a fourteen line poem with a turn in the last two lines. No it isn't rhymed, no it isn't iambic (purely). I still think it's a sonnet. It's also an ekphrasic poem, meaning that the subject matter is located in another media, either visual or sonic, and is in this case a painting by Francis Bacon. You can view the artwork at http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/4884

-A.J.

Behind the Curtain

'The Circus’ is such a dirty phrase that does
no justice to the old magic of the
word 'Carnival.’ The carnival was such
a place of intrigue, false identities
and shrouded faces which we flirted with
as children, peeking from behind our parents legs.

The men and women of the show did so
much more than shock with feats and tricks.
Away from paying eyes, the people under
the paint and hats, the lights and leotards
and glitter, lived in trailers cracked with rust.

With no one watching, they would play the songs
of home – of Spain, of Sweden, and Utah –
to children of their own, and whisper tunes
in French and Gaelic over tinny sounds
of mandolins and banjos under their
deflated Big Top and ice-white moonlight.

Form Week

Hi, folks. Sorry for the delay in posting new stuff. It was my brother-in-law's 30th birthday this weekend, and I had too much fun at our 90's themed rager of a party. On to business.

This week I'll be posting poems written in form. For the uninitiated, that means there are certain parameters that I've adhered to which dictate the poem's line length, rhyme scheme, or sequence of repetitions. I choose to write mostly in free verse, but switching to formal poetics is a nice way to reorganize the thought process, and generate poems that would otherwise go unwritten.

To start the week, I'll post "Behind the Curtain", a poem written in blank verse.

Thanks again to all you folks that have visited the site and read my work.

-A.J.

From Memphis

These days your name is a
phrase that tears my ears,
and writing is catching my foot on a nail
or stepping in broken glass someone left behind.

A phrase that tears on my ears
fragments your face. Hearing your name is
like stepping in broken glass that someone left behind –
it reminds me of objections left unvoiced.

Your face is fragmented, and your name
has become ashes that crowd my tray.
Spring reminds me of objections left unvoiced –
of reluctant copulations and uncomfortable sweat.

Ashes crowd my tray because,
these days, your name reminds me
of our reluctant copulations and uncomfortable sweat.
Writing this is like catching my foot on a nail
and my tongue is trembling on the seal of the envelope
that I don’t know I’ll send.

Barroom

I have drowned my sorrows in ethanol litanies
poured from malformed mouths.

the dust of ashtrays mingles
with Mingus counter-points to my rage:


rage at the sight of women
without smiles…


skirts sodden by raped flesh…


disillusionment in the eye of a child,
their hero slaughtered by defamation…


withering perfume of magnolias…



religious wars; persecutions of faith
and damnable laughter
on battlefields –

executions executed by unofficial agencies;
victim’s skulls
demolished by rifle-bullets –

unconscionable treatments of prisoners;
cauterized stumps of fingers, removed genitals,
nipples severed from chests…



an ultrasound that reveals
barrenness inside of a woman
and the divorce that follows –

an ex-wife’s suicide
and the vomit that pools
at the back of her throat –

seven people gathered for a funeral,
the deceased all but discarded by their family –

a home abandoned by warmth…



a musician struck deaf,
who will never again hear the voice
of the music they love…

a sixteen-year-old girl
whose spine has been severed,
who will never feel the touch of a lover…

a blind man
who’s never seen the faces of his children
or how steeped in pain they’ve become…

an amnesiac
who may never remember their spouse
or the love they once felt…



I do not kneel and pray.

I have folded my pity in an envelope
and mailed it to God.

I'm technologically retarded. Sorry.

I have taken down the "Literary Criticism" and "Music" pages due to the fact that I can't post content to them like on the home page. One solution is to overwrite new material over old material, and that's the way I'm leaning, but I've got to get to work, so I'll probably have the pages back up by the end of the day with some new shit. Thanks everyone for visiting and reading.

-AJ

East of Los Angeles

I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke played on us by superior beings on a humorous planet.
~ Bob Kaufman

Hollywood I salute you, artistic cancer of the universe!
~ Bob Kaufman

Outcasts and long fingernails,
bucket lists and sidelong looks from communities dead
to those on the other side of the barbed wire fences
posted by bigots who shout
DO NOT CROSS YOURSELF UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN HISTORICALLY SANCTIONED

***

Jumble Jumble rolling sliding in and out of ears, opened valves,
and with no money to pay the water bill…
Overrun electrical plants humming under streetlamps,
a burning cathedral pump,
a blessing and a scream…

***

The hobos have new homes
in the flatbeds of tanks, modified for road-tripping – street legal.
Phillip Morris owns helicopters and
magpies and mockingbirds sing car alarm songs to wake neighbor dogs
while brakelights signal FUCK YOU in stenciled shadows
across windshields at 2 AM
when drivers just can’t wait to make their turnoff
to sniff flowered bells…

***

The poet stands marooned in the Mohavé with his peyote trip worn off,
with no more freak shows, raves, or fuck-puppets to write about anymore –

he can only masturbate to his preconceived notions of Chicana lesbian dreams
and press on the outside of pants once sold for 19.95 for its irregular stitch in the side
because it laughed too hard as the Cambodian seamstress ran it thru the machine….

***

Marines coming up from Sandiego with purple veins in their necks and purpler dicks seek out college gurls who swoon over muscles and the threat of death…

Immigrants from NorCal are dearly out of place among putty-faced snowglobe-nosed Hollywood, their innocence endearing for all their politics…

True Americans, the people standing at the intersections selling fruit to you thru your window, making
their own way from the ultimate bottom up – I wonder how many cats they’ll have to strangle before they get to the top of the garbage heap…

***

perfumed plumbs from way up on top of this hill can’t cover up the smell of ash
falling from the sky that looks like snow and smears across foreheads like charcoal,
a blasphemous Ash Wednesday:

exactly what’s expected in summertime in southerncaliforni-a,
burnt to the ground and rebuilt again, then burn, harder, bigger, faster
and with twice as much news coverage…

***

Spend two weeks there and I’ll bet you’ll be able ta kick the shit out of any New Yorker
any time, any where.

Rejection

This week I'll be posting poems that have been previously rejected from literary magazines and journals. One day I hope these will appear in a chapbook of sorts that will highlight what's acceptably "far-out" and what's too far-out for public consumption. I hope y'all enjoy.

The Hike (myth bone thunder kerosene)

Thunder cracked like bones under the pressure of a steamroller.
Cradling our kerosene lanterns, the promise of shelter escaped us.
It became a myth told through the line, some truth uttered
only by those who believed in strength.

Scaling the Wall (plastic rope leaf teeth)

Staring up the wall, the leaves trembled.
I could not believe my camp counselor
when he said that a little round piece of plastic
and a knot of nylon rope
could keep my teeth from being ground
to dust.

Where I'm Calling From (cut find moon telephone)

On the face of my wife
there was a sliver of moon, cut
by the shadow of itself.

I waited for four days.
I have littered the house
with burger wrappers
and pizza boxes
so that I cannot find
the telephone.

The Market (rise ring public meat)

Storefronts opened. Cuts of meat
gleamed despite the fog encroaching.
The devouring public’s shouts and barterings
rose to a din.
We made our way between clusters of shoppers
and hunted for that one thing
that might come to become dear to us.
Now, what remains, is only a ring.

Update Schedule

This weekend two employers contacted me with job offers, so I'm going to have to establish a posting schedule for this blog. It's a good thing, since I've run into the problem of having a bunch of inspiration at the start of a new project, and then the well runs dry for months at a time.

While I won't be able to update on a daily or every-other-day basis as I've been doing, I think I can manage a three times a week posting schedule.

From here on out, I will do my best to post new poems and other writing-related content on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Thanks to everyone that's been visiting the site. I'll have more "4word" poems for y'all on Wednesday.

Summer Job (roof gold viper lodge)

The viper’s bite made my ankle swell,
lodged between the roof shingles.
I don’t know how it managed to get up there,
but as the wound began to leak gold,
I understood that that
really didn’t matter.

Redecorating (oak magnetic brick rubber)

That oak desk was magnetic to you.
You sought it out amongst the brick pillars
edged with bicycle tire rubber.

Four Word Poems

I went poking around in my external hard drive and found some short poems. Some of them are alright, by my standards, but why I've decided to post them here is an effort to get myself writing again. It's hard work to get a full-bodied poem - or at least the bare guts of a poem - to come out in one shot. This is, I suppose a glimpse of how my wormy little brain works when I use a writing exercise.

Partial attribution should go out to Nick Gaudio - former roommate and one of the smartest writers I've ever been lucky enough to know - for proposing the writing exercise in the first place.

Bob Kaufman's Future Blues

It is the time for choleric filial
piety and organ donors
to cash their checks.
It is time for pipers to be paid
in crackerjack prizes,
fake tattoos and miniature
Chinese fingercuffs.

A generation without a Beat
to lead it into tomorrow,
trail-blaze paths with wheat threshers
and napalm.
A generation without a poet to crucify,
only celebrities who don’t scream
unless you pay cash up front.

We are in the times
you envisioned, nightmare.
Times when poetry would be forgotten,
when Jazz would become a lost art, and
forms of shadows dance
on the back walls of libraries
before they are decommissioned.

The new poet stands alone in the desert
with his peyote trip worn off,
with no more sorrows or fuck-puppets
to write about anymore.
The black sounds you heard
evade him;
they know better.

Like Noah, we few will wait for a sign.
A sign that it’s safe to touch
a solid earth of hot beatitudes.
I can now speak fluent Japanese
and I have taught the children
how to speak Beat.
When a pelican carries me a chicken bone
engraved with Sanskrit,
detailing the perfect recipe
for oatmeal cookies,
I will know to head to North Beach
and find you.

Public Service Announcement (Covering my ass)

I created this blog six years ago to satisfy a course requirement in college, but I've decided to re-purpose it to expose my work to a wider audience.

I will do my best to update regularly, whether it's a poem or my thoughts on a news article or some of my literary criticism, but please be aware that my work is primarily reserved for publication and if a post is picked up for publication, said post will be removed from this site.

Also, please do not try and pass my work off as your own elsewhere. It's bad enough I don't get paid to do this, but once I don't even get the credit for doing what I do, that's just fucked up.

I realize I may be writing this to no one, since no one really visits this site, but in this day and age I have to cover my own ass.

Amnesiac Phrenology

Kinetic energy and molten sensations,
weapons-grade amnesia and plate tectonics of the skull -
its boiling rock is diverging and converging while
black sounds in the temporal hemisphere are erupting in arc volcanics.

Weapons-grade amnesia and plate tectonics of the skull
send aftershocks that shake transform boundaries in the lips and eyes.
The black sounds in the temporal hemisphere are erupting in arc volcanics
as pooled ether cools into obsidian nights.

Aftershocks shake transform boundaries in the lips and eyes,
creating ridge-lines and hot, infertile valleys of resent while
pooled ether cools into obsidian nights of
rememberances - of old scents and honeyed colors.

Ridge-lines and hot, infertile valleys of resent
surround rigid pools of dewed memory,
rememberances of old scents, of old, honeyed colors
of aprons and the click of heels, of parasols and pinstripes.

Rigid pools of dewed memory -
of laughter and mustard flowers, the white
of aprons and the click of heels, of parasols and pinstripes -
bubble and evaporate, soon becoming cumulonimbus reminiscence.

Heavy with laughter and mustard flowers, the white
clouds darken and release memory on the surface -
it evaporates on contact and returns to the sky, and
the skull is covered in soothing reminiscence.

The clouds darken and release memory on the surface,
where boiling rock is converging and diverging.
Soon the whole skull will be covered in cumulonimbus reminiscence
maintained by kinetic energy and molten sensations.