unsuspecting liar would you park here near the fire

Saturday 30 September 2006

More names. Name poems. Poem names.

Heather Has Always Moved Away

Trust only the brisk, the spirit
with a little bit of sputter behind
it, the others under the same rain.
It's odd to head for another's awning.
But Heather, I miss you like a roadtrip
leaks music, and I thread my legs through
the fire escape bars to listen for operas
from the cats, their secrets of claw sweat.

We do, we do to daydream of the snag
that will elude us still, come next
October, next ban on leaf burning
lobbied for by your biddy neighbors
and their chimney milk like new Pope smoke.
The mailman knows them and won't say shit.

We want, we want to daydream of the knowing
why the bomb crams like a toothache into
Mesopotamian cobble chinks. Heather,
they have carpet in the porta-potties,
and I have flushed what others install.

God put stinkbugs under my bike brakes
to scare me over my handlebars, while
they say kids these days mistake lists
for substance, and I say bullshit and
lick pavement from my elbows and who knows
along with quartz and tar how much errant hair.

Heather, our community theatre did the Wiz
with four of the original munchkins,
but I don't know what to think of that.
Play intermission feels like you crawled
for a pee out the back of a dream. But
who are these children in line, giggling?

Heather, the most beautiful I've yet to
feel was in an emergency waiting room,
where I watched an old man fling backwards
from his walker like fuck it into the
tiles. You can feel a little or a lot
or a variety or nothing, though more
if you still go in for that caroling shit.

Heather, you hear tabbies like the voice
of an other. Or two. Even better. I want you
to tell me a nightmare about jousting giraffes
or catching bird flu, and I want to remember it
under my nails. Please do, so much do I want to
dream up the yous of how flab scrapes nipple.

But still will the night clank, and still
will the night cram us all sausage meal
into its bus huts and the buses between.
I am just a wish vendor low on pennies,
but come on Heather, come on in and in.
Out from the goofy jail of the bones
you know, in for the vessels you don't.

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about july

Wednesday 20 September 2006

I spent one afternoon with two people who kept calling everything weird. A man dancing in the dollar store to a kiddie piano? Weeird! Someone's brother named Setee? He's weeird! Weather? It's weeird! Strollers without mothers? That's weeird! A pamphlet with seven pieces of advice for pedestrians? How weeird! People wearing clothes from Hot Topic or pink, polka-dotted belts? Ugh, they're weeird!

Later, over the phone, they kept making jokes about someone in the background having my baby. I asked the phone person to ask this background person if our baby were an underwater dance. The person on the phone refused to say it. They were just words. Is the baby an underwater dance? See? I typed them. Just said them. My capillaries didn't fizzle. But she refused. It was "too weird."

Refused to say them!

Earlier, these two people had argued about spatulas. Two spatulas, red and blue, were ugly -- and one, white, was okay.

Also, one of these people received numerous phone calls, during which she said things like "Yeah, totally, I've just been so .. yeah, I really need to clear some time for 'hanging out.' No, no, I need to catch up on 'hanging out' with people.."

I thought it was dumb and sad, how she thought everything was weird. I wanted to tell someone about it, but she is friends with a lot of my friends, so I decided to blog about it.

Welcome to the new model of confession, Michael. There is no vestibule to cross. There are a million priests next to my speech, and none of them are certified.

I had an email discussion with John Wang about blogs. We talked about the possibility of students blogging as they learned to write. Like from third grade on. He said: "If everyone blogged we’d cut crime and juvenile delinquency and adult illiteracy down in no time. We’d also hear more about aliens and bicycles flying over mountains..."

This post has changed. I'm sorry. From talking about my disgust with the word "weird" to blogs. Blogs aren't the venerators of self-obsession. All a narcissist needs is water or body odor.

People act like blogs are old news, tiresome. But they haven't been around that long. Most ancient tribes thought written speech would erode memory. One time I memorized a three page monolog in twenty minutes. And my brain is clogged with Nickelodeon quotes.

Why shouldn't every emo-person write a blog? A weird blog. The grunt of "no one cares about their stupid life" is always more true without the blog. You have found and read more random blogs than attic diaries.

The anti-blog argument is so asinine that it makes my ankles itch, like seventy-nine trillion hobo phytoplankton trying to make me trip. It goes sort of like this: "Don't publish pointless emotional or intellectual diatribes on the internet because other people will think you're wasting their internet time. Too many people write blogs." This is like saying "don't talk to anyone when you're in a tall building; you are wasting tall building time" or "don't think when you're on a submarine; you are wasting our submarine thinking space."

Who cares if other people have already tackled emo-person's mishmash. Who gives a shit if nothing is new news. If I decide to not post this, turn off my computer, and save electricity, the electric company will save money on operating costs and use that money to expand their services through new equipment, which will be made in factories that employ oil and render my conservation useless. Most conservation is useless.

Conservatism, thinking most things are weird, is useless. The more you shun people or pretend to ignore them, the more audacious go their self-performances. Clap or spit in their ears: it's all acknowledgment currency. I want to meet Setee and give him a jackrabbit and a free coupon for Greek food.

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dzanc books dzanc books dzanc books

Tuesday 12 September 2006

This is an excerpt from the press release of a super-cool new organization designed to publish literary fiction and promote literature, literary journals, and literary awareness:

"Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 organization set up to operate exclusively for charitable, literary, and educational purposes. Our mission at Dzanc is 3-pronged: To assist literary journals in reaching the largest reader base possible; to develop educational programs within the schools in the areas of reading and writing; and, beginning in 2007, to publish two excellent works of literary fiction per year."

Their services to schools and journals will be 100% free.

Dzanc is run by Steve Gillis of 826 Michigan and Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers' Network, both extremely able and well-equipped people committed to what might be technically monikered as the "reading and writing of wonderful stuff."

I am really stoked about this. These guys know what they're doing. This is a much more important post than my normal posts, in which I post poems that make people roll their eyes.

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r u gonna find a new boy to spoon????

Saturday 9 September 2006

Kasey, I know you'll get a kick out of this: two new songs from Herman Düne, your second-favorite HD, courtesy of Songs: Illinois (and a little hyperbole, but hey):

Get new HD songs

In other news: my friend Jordaan Mason is making a chapbook of his prose and poetry. You will want to get it. I owe him a copy of my handmade chapbook, blue wheels and handshakes. The cover is BLUE. Kasey Mohammad, Joe Massey, and Bryan Coffelt all have copies and keep them to sneeze on and stuff.

If you want one, let me know and I will try to make you one before we're overrun by space gerbils. I will mail it to you for free, but you can PayPal me postage at mrgoldsoft@hotmail.com if you so dig.

For being a DIY indie-kid, I have a dastardly time with meat-and-potatoes DIY stuff like stapling or taping. If the modern publishing rackets crumple, and we return to an arena of DIY media that demands some actual skill in one's self-presentation, the avatar named Mike Young is pretty much fucked. Computers, computers I can ice. Staples? Awful. Like a volcano trying to play cricket.

Letitia Trent sent me a chapbook, which I have neglected to thank her for or mention anywhere. It was cool and had poems culled from Readers' Digest pages. I think she is sending them out for free if you want one. Here's her MySpace. It has music from Ladytron!

Um, let's see. Everything else you probably already know. The "summer" issue of NOÖ will be more like an October issue, Lisa Jarnot's "Sea Lyrics" is one of my favorite long poems, lots of people are in love and the wind is growing teeth. See? Y'all know that shit.

Clay told us all to read about Kasey's schism of poetry into the palliative and the cathartic, so you should probably give that new toy a few twirls. Say something about it. Like something something. My articulation could paint fences.

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play the piano with your tongue hair

Sunday 3 September 2006

She in Bed and He in Morning

When she dozes off,
and he slips from the
bed to meet his friend
for pumpkin bread and coffee--

How wind seems rude as a faucet,
how all cotton sleeves drowse
away in flecks, dandelion clocks.

How strangers on bicycles
tuck or wag their miles of tongue
and shriek a bunch of oily hair.

How all tastes of burnt coconut.
How the drive melts water.

And when his friend waves and
laughs, it ricochets through his teeth
like a tennis ball in a museum
under night watch, every boing
the freeze tag of brutal light.

They gab for some odd hours.
Then he calls his kitchen phone
to see if she is up--to hope
that the call will not wake her.

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peak oil means there is no such thing as a mission

I've gotten over some of my reluctance about poem introductions. We don't share a brain, just a language. So: this is a poem that is not about the universe. Sometimes different narrators jump in and out, like a conversation at a party or in a chatroom. My favorite words in this poem are the rhythm prepositions. The poem is bewildered and pretty. Like lynxes hung on Christmas trees.

Record Us Up Here on the Train

What do you say near railroads and ocean hotels
that doesn't sound like it needs raccoon makeup?

Let us gut the apple pastry shells and fill them
with teeth varnish and benzyl peroxide and four
shitty compensations for our loss of the waltz.

I have a list of those to whom we owe apologies:
anyone in photos missing feet, infants in drawers,
that LP on primetime TV with the shotgun,
all the gooey glitches of the way too sunk.
Lucky us tho! See: we get blowjobs from
gameshow relics and Audi owners and tuned eyebrows.
That class with the next-nicer spaghetti sauce.
Dude, this cereal! This suffering, this summer labor?
You don't know. It sort of feels okay-ish some.

That waitress who lifts barbells on her balcony
looks like a tabloid actress sometimes, then a girl
from your subscription to Sad Foreign Shrapnel.
That is, on certain nights she makes your chest white
and looks almost a whole life long. Almost full.

What do you say on railcars in cotton hoodies
that doesn't sound like the sitcom's drug episode?

I promise not to drink of corporate yerba matte soda,
which is $4.75 and tastes like green hair gel.
We shall sustain the raisin boxes and baby carrots.
Wait, do you need oil to make cardboard?
Google when the carrot season starts. A gourd?

Shit: anything now to remember a squaredance.
This emo-ass shuffle of wilt and dust soccer
will not look impressive on top of the boxcar
or get me from the cattle to the textiles,
from CRYOGENIC BODIES to DINOSAUR MODELS.
Hey, a boxcar full of new white horses.
It's something more to soldier for, I think.

You dangle over to photograph some graffiti.
I make seventeen billion jokes about midnight,
none of them an ark or an underwater kiss.

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