20,000 A.D. and also now
I was at Green Apple books last week for Charlie Jane’s book launch for Lessons in Magic and Disaster (which you should buy and read) and did my usual browse of the poetry shelves to see if anything jumped out at me. Oh yeah! This book was obviously going to be fire,
And yes! Super fucking amazing! Oh my god! In a way that made me kind of squirm in embarrassment because I kept seeing lines I could have written. “He does all of my tricks!” (hyphen-noun gizmos, sprinkled here & there) Even though I suppose it should be the other way around. Rather than worry about that sort of thing I settle on excited kinship!!! It’s like the best hug from a stranger!
I won’t talk about the title piece(s) yet but they are good.
The VFW Crawling Contest blew me away. A horrible & visceral experience as the poem’s speaker crawls for days, blood and sweat, grime, asphalt, trash,
A bunch of it made me think of when I was a kid in Detroit in the 70s and would pick up bottle caps out of the gutter for my bottle cap collection (neatly mounted on styrofoam trays and kept in a shoe box). And the griminess of the playgrounds and vacant lots full of broken glass and cigarette butts where I was right down in it in my bare feet. The thick back of the tongue smell of sooty early spring slush along the curb. And the feeling later on in Houston when I’d start to toughen up my feet for the summer walking on the asphalt till I had a quarter inch layer of callus to protect me from heat and sharp things.
The crawler does it all, is at eye level with the truck tires and beer tabs and keeps just going forward. suffering is matter of fact and relentless. the crawler endures.
i think of all the people on the street and their experience.
“a hot dog
& baked beans please
just drop it in the tar.”
Life is disgusting and visceral, there are things about embodiment that we just slide over — over & over. What is it about people that we are animals enduring all of this?
Aesthetics can be the worst lie – fascism in fact.
I used to mock the boys spewing out endless pale bukowski-clone bullshit and called them “body fluid poets” because they went really no further than a toddler realizing barf and poop are icky. It went no where and said nothing and wasn’t shocking in the way they wished they could get to, didn’t disrupt ::shit::.
O Lake of Shooting Stars, the eye-souls
zzzt! zzzt! fall to
fulfillment beneath thy surface.
I honestly didn’t remember who Ed Sanders was but then with a lookup remembered! Duh!!!! Fucking powerful poet & lyricist & a sort of driving force! Just the sort of zine-y motherfucker –
Floating over the page and fucking around with everything – a kindred spirit.
Of course endlessly relevant as well.
Some bits & pieces:
and this: that
only a whining hour past,
Richard Nixon
oozed down Pennsylvania Avenue
flashing V’s from a limousine
behind a stutter-footed wary pack of marines
their
bayonettes stabbing the January
in a thickery of different directions
like small lance-hairs
pricked up on the forehead of a
  hallucinated drool-fiend
during a bummerbut big enough to stab the
throats of hippie riotersbuddy,
I picked a yellow petalfrom thy grave
Mr. Robert Kennedy
and later, in the poem “That is, they WANTED you to think that you were garbage, that no one was innocent, that everything was corrupt”
When the government
of the United States tried
to set up the air
in which to unroll
the rolls of U.S. Steel
Cyclone Fence for the
concentration campswhat did you
do for the
pure-hearted protestors
shat upon w/ electro-
magnetic nazinixazism
by th’ secret Dom-Int police?What did you
do to ease
the suffering
of those who
yearn to walk
w/ you in innocence?
Yes – grab the flower & share it – I like that there are so many turns to joy or ecstatic poetyness in the thick of oppression.
I went around after the reading starry eyed explaining The Fugs (out demon out!!) to my fellow book nerds and was a bit sad no one had ever heard of them. What the fuck?!!! Even the other genX? Continuing my mission to be a bridge for ghosts.
