Thursday, March 31, 2011

Pronto

Freaky grand musk
with opal ditch milk
all regal and dipped,
like caramel.
From lips to slits
some gills get bunched
and thrilled
with slick coolant.
Build a jelly castle
with lube and mischief
then get kinks and blows.
Light up the light
and feel the vibe, pronto.
It's like that y'all.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Wednesday Top 10

1) Tara in the Pool by The YMCA

2) Open City by Teju Cole

3) Toward You by Jim Krusoe

4) Mud Coffee on Smith Street

5) Yellow Roses

6) Sugar Cane Studded Belt

7) Wild Ginger

8) Fiorentini and Baker Desert Boots

9) Kurt Vile

10) My blue and white striped beanie from Grahame Fowler on W. 10th

Hymn to Life

"A cardinal passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day down."

James Schuyler, from "Hymn to Life"

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Oh March

The day is bright blue
a white pigeon messes
with the cold sky
making me think
it's a white hanky
tossed from a high building
a blur of real life
and I'm up on my toes
what else is up there?

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Take Care

To think that dawn happens
with a daily and urgent frequency
is really sort of miraculously routine.
That there are people here among us
who love what we do in a capsulized way;
people who may not see the in between spaces.
In a wordless motion we can say what we mean
(a lot). We can walk away from the train after waiting
a very long time next to the tracks for it to arrive. We can
do that in time, as time is passing, in real time.
In a gesture, in this room now: low heart rate, low heat,
traffic bumping my skull, the floor is a drum.
These are the very least of my worries.
Take care, take care.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Julianna Barwick - Bob in Your Gait

This is simply gorgeous. Thanks for the link, Laura.

Kurt Vile - Baby's Arms

Making Matters Worse

Sic Alps - Zeppo Epp

Friday, March 25, 2011

A Pleasant Discovery

Leaping into the air and realizing there is simply no way
to stay up there with an abrupt flapping motion. Sucks!
How odd to eat only one thing for levity
like raisins baked into a potato. In spite
of its limitations, you must consider the possibilities
of leaping, daily. Whatever monster ails you,
leap into the cool wind. I am putting instructions
in this poem so you'll consider me an authority.
You don't know what this poem means yet.
I have the necessary education
for this type of work. I will imitate the sound
of your father laughing into a microphone
through a public address system in your place of work.
How did that idea get into this poem?
I will put stickers on your back that will instruct the people
around you to behave in a certain way towards you.
I will leap through the air when you exit the subway, you'll see.
I just wanted to give you a quick overview of my plans.
In closing, I hope you have a magical day.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Art Night at Sandeep's





Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Pull My Daisy by Robert Frank

"Early morning in the universe..." -Jack Kerouac

The Book of Pure Tone

1) Cherry Red Second Hand.

2) West Egg Suede Long Wing.

3) Sand and Snuff.

4) Walt Trousers.

You're Welcome!
Todd!

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Go Team

Your angel is made of lightweight
carbon fiber. The words you use under
no name glasses are tinted to the spectrum
of glee by modes unheard of in universal slimming
formulas. The windswept riverside is ready
for your umber feet. All the pretty birds are raising
their wings in a manner that says thrust,
offal, or bang. Thin and radiant,
all the paths lead to your elegant stews.
A twenty-seven dollar bird cooked in salt?
I am into your tender flesh thank you
for threading the needle of my hunger
in an effort to remove anxiety, self pity,
doubt, durable goods. I'll see to it
that your bones are negative landscaped
somewhere along Bleeker Street
another high end pedestrian mall
waiting for yonder cupcakes.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Donadio and Olson

This is delightful!

Friday Top 10

1) Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art, Edited by John C. Welchman

2) How Long, poems by Ron Padgett

3) Another 13 by Le Labo

4) The first really warm day of 2011

5) Hibino (Sushi) on Henry Street

6) A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

7) Flax Seed Oil

8) Jutta Neumann leather cuff

9) Cire Trudon: Spiritus Sancti candle

10) Patience, Humility, Fortitude

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Help Japan






















Some good ways to help, here.

Wing Wing

It takes all week to live a week
there aren't any shortcuts in today's economy
we're all poor and vaguely autistic
and Xanax just makes you feel zonked
like grape soda poured over the whites
in a washing machine: it stains.
I am despised but that hasn't stopped me
from writing this to you.
Show me a poet that's lived a perfect life
and I'll never speak to her again.
A gang of punks walk in and the phone
has wings, it's the alarm going off,
you really need to wake up, pay the bills
and buy some milk and tissues. Your feet
are blue and the wind seems to
be physically beating the shit
out of the people walking to their jobs
each day of the week is a reason
to stomp out of the house onto
the yawning esplanade of your
no-name neighborhood clutching
a cigar box stuffed with dead orchids.
Your life is a movie playing to an empty
theater flickering on empty seats. Fuck it,
I'm your friend, that's why I'm writing
this to you from a gazebo in deep winter
dead leaves skitter like brown spiders
under my lawn chair across the yard
and down the street home to you
and they can't take that away from me.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Here We Go

Not that the sun is remarkable
for its vast sunniness or that the earth
is moving around in different directions
twisted into a sphere spewing what we built
on it. No, not that at all. I keep meaning
to mean more than I meant before
things started to fall apart which they
always have been doing more or less.
I guess walking somewhere and just
enjoying some trees and the way the weather
feels on my face maybe hello to someone
maybe a poem from long ago in a dusty book
or a lover's hand on the back of my neck. Maybe
just experience that while it lasts
and it won't last but it's here now.
Maybe that's it, maybe this is all we have
and so much more and it won't last forever.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Five Hands





Friday, March 11, 2011

Cat Power - Metal Heart

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Thursday Top 10

1) What a morning hug will do: enliven you to the point of skin expansion.

2) Joy is contagious.

3) In my hand: my gray felt fedora.

4) On my head: the complete works of the sky.

5) Maybe something is hitched under my arms making me feel 10 lbs. lighter.

6) The magnitude of the memory of kissing: huge, large, grand.

7) Fiorentini and Baker = Feeling hot.

8) My manuscript of poems is done! Tentative title: The Bone Above the Heart

9) Every morning I sing a little song for the mailman. Today he smiled for me, for the first time.

10) Sometimes I look at people and think: wanna make out?

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Sweetheart

What is this smooth blur
making the horizon all smudged
with dopamine and glitter?
Something bright is casting
a blinking word from a neon sign.
Lists of past woes fade into the
mechanism of retrieval. They are
burning meat in the swarm of the mighty.
Here we are with the glass table top
full of crayons and built tough stuff.
You might as well get it on with me.

Monday, March 07, 2011

The History of Migraines

The first migraine in the United States was reported near Baltimore, Maryland by a bartender named Earl Craig. He saw a flash of holy heavy whiteness before being overcome by the coal-stained sky above him as he left the bar he tended in the early morning hours of Sunday, September 27th, 1890. In a letter Earl Craig wrote to his fiance later that day, he referred to the onset of the migraine as being struck by a heavy pendulum of white hot light. Later that year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Darla Desmond, mother of three, collapsed in front of her children from the sheer weight of light around her. Within months of these two separate but deeply connected events, the word migraine became something people up and down the east coast came to associate with The Light Sickness, a term phrased by Louis Wertheimer, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot's who lived, by way of Chicago, Illinois and Green Bay Wisconsin, in Paris, France for most of his adult life. Because of Wertheimer, the word migraine became erroneously associated with lime used to hasten the decay of dead cattle. Many theories at the time blamed the manufacture of lime and its toxic offshoot, alkaline powder, for the advent of migraine clusters in North America.

I will deliver my lecture "The History of Migraines" in its entirety on this blog on May 13, 2011 starting at 6:00 AM as part of the Furman-Regents Lecture Series which is sponsored, in part, by the Maplewood Lecture Foundation and the St. Olaf Valiant Approach Foundation.

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Helium Poem

Would you please bring me something
inflatable with helium in it
to lift me above the cloud cover?
You know, like a balloon of some sort
coated with a narcotic that makes
for a pleasant buzz when inhaled.
Perhaps you could assist me in making
the sun appear certain and buttery and bright?
With any luck we'll get the landscape
to turn all cinnamony like a bun
in an airport with people standing around
glad to see me for the joy I bring
into their lives. With gorgeous chrome springs
in our shoes we'll all begin hopping
like ecstatic children hop
and the asphalt will be glazed with
our lemonade and bike chain oil
and all will be well for an instant
and that's just fine by me.

Saturday, March 05, 2011

The Velvet Underground - I Heard Her Call My Name

"I heard her call my name and then my mind split open"

Uh huh. Turn it up.

Friday, March 04, 2011

Jake Mooney has a New Blog!






















Here.

Salute

We stole an artillery shell to make a saddle. We rode the horse as far as we could and then we got off and wandered off down a block with remarkably fragrant mimosa blossoms. We had a wonderful time with technical difficulties during our salute to Brooklyn on mushrooms. I remarked that I had poise under pressure and promised to be better, get better, look better and be luckier. We fattened up the horse with herbed butter sauces and laughed as it waddled under the tight fitting artillery shell. At one point you said you'd had enough and that you wouldn't be coming back. I saluted you with three Chinook helicopters that ferried the horse through a funnel of smoke. Journalists leapt to their cameras and phones. Outside was a statue of Madonna in the bushes under a crest of green mold. I took my shoes off and my watch met my eyes.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Thursday Top 5 People

1) Carrie Howland at Donadio and Olson, Inc.

2) Nick Flynn at Joe's Pub.

3) Amanda Stern at Joe's Pub.

4) Greg Hamilton at JR.

5) A guy named Matt who cuts hair on Smith Street.

Bright Blue Music

You can jump up and down
and cup your hands around your mouth
so as to show someone you are talking
and that you are free from fear and technology
you can talk to thin air crisp and electric
voice of sandpaper streams of blue ribbons
strewn on your bicycle when all is well
with the world or when it's not
you can sleep in a little butterball
and know you are loved.

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

It Just Goes to Show You

The world was at work so we flew
the animal in to tell us tales of flying and working
and so on. We wanted to be amused by a real animal
and we were. We all have to work
at something so we got that animal
and raised that animal up into the world
to work at something we could all appreciate
until we got jacked and decided the animal
was a bore with all of its brooding.
We just wanted to be distracted by delightful tales
from what we should have been doing for ourselves,
like shopping for stuff that people could ask us about.
It's like this: I tied the animal to a wing
and I flew while the animal brooded and told
me what it saw down below.
What a long time to raise an animal in today's world!
It just goes to show you that people like the informal
atmosphere where they can just chill and stop brooding
about having to be all formal with titles and personalities.
For your information: Work do's and don'ts: do not act
like a sullen animal if you're feeling grumpy
about having to work where you'd rather not have a job to do.
Don't fuck my shit up with your sullen animal bullshit;
you are not a rockstar--you are an animal, like me. In other news:
The weather was good in all directions
at once, bucking a 40-knot yellow bird
at sundown. Then we drove a 1966
Plymouth Valiant, formerly owned by
Neta Snook who taught Amelia Earhart
to fly. The car ran flawlessly. I hope
you find a new job soon.

Neta Snook


Here.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Tuesday Top 10

1) Lives of the poets.

2) Cleaning the rocket chair.

3) Cleared for take off.

4) The cultural boomerang.

5) Lifting belly.

6) I'm not going to cry.

7) The air is #1.

8) Brooklyn is sparkling clean.

9) Verisimilitude.

10) Make a new living.

Jean-Paul Belmondo Day