Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Connections

 


Foxconn puts up nets
Around the rim of the factory roof
So workers don't jump to their deaths
In New York City
Speakers of languages
Sparking and fading
On apartment stairwells
Wonder about the verses
Of 100 poets every 100 years
For dozens of centuries
Vanishing like vapor
Risen up from the steam grates
Or the windows of food carts
Cadences caught in Central Park trees
Metabolizing in North Atlantic clouds
Rhymes rebounding
Off pavements in Chinatown
Off synagogue stones in Alphabet City
Poet Xu Lizhi recalls he looks like
His grandfather "beanpole"
As he "clothes hanger" falls asleep
Standing up again
On the line in Shenzhen
Verses scribbled into notebooks
On timed breaks
Will he find the time
To say what
Must be said

(paintings by Christine Ferrera)

I Didn't Know Patti Smith

 


I didn't move to London
I didn't live in the East Village
I didn't know Patti Smith
Things didn't work out
I lived bohemian decline
The freedom was partial
Mine was a typical story
Survival was victory
Day jobs without glamour
I acquired cooking skills
I learned languages
I outlived friends in more rapid
Bohemian decline
I didn't realize my dreams
Or they laid down by the river
And emerged on the other side
Transformed
Into water beasts walking
Weed-draped moon–driven
The least American story
And the most American story
Verses written furtively
Spiral notebooks of neurosis
Medical mishaps
Love affairs like spiritual possession
Or hard drugs
Writing songs about UFOs
Theatrical productions in sheds
My footprints in Baltimore graveyards
The indentations deeper
As I hummed a song
And carried a ghost on my shoulders
Sensing this vaguely
My weight and the ghost's
Imprinting into the fossil record
Encountered as enigma
In 20 million years
After the Chesapeake rose
And receded again and birthed
Shellish now unknown
Will they know
I struggled
I spoke
I sang
I made
things

(photo: author in the play "De camino a la ahorita" by Colectivo El Pozo 2018)

A Soul Scrolls Social Media

 


What I didn't become
What I didn't make
What I am not
What I lack
Where I've failed
What went wrong
What fell through
What went up in smoke
What came to naught
What ran aground
What met with disaster
And why
The musical score of ruin
The pages of living unsuccessfully
Psychological ticks lost to stalemate
There's no such thing as society
Tony Robbins is not your guru
This he told me
Under the gazebo
In a silent park named Dvorak
Fractures in the purple sky
Tony Robbins ascending
(His mesmerizing teeth)
Then plummeting torpedo-like
Into temporary fencing
Landing barefoot in the tent city
Tony Robbins now beat fellaheen blue
Striding broke-kneed callous-footed
Grateful to be fallen wandering
The soul scrolling social media is made whole

(drawing by Robert Jessup, 1985) 
All reac

Survivor's Guilt 6000 Miles Away

 


what am I seeing
are other people seeing this
did we really need
to learn again
how this can happen

Poems Needed

 


we have poems
about madness
and poems written
in states of madness
no poems yet about
the guitar amp buzzing
dark electric fuzz
of the madness sparked
coming off psychmeds
we lack poems about
the inner fast-motion
tectonic mortar and pestle
funny car fuck up
metabolic cataclysm
of reducing lexapro benzos
seroquel risperdal trazodone zyprexa
indeed more poems
are needed about
the sludge avalanche
transistor radio
crackle-to-explosion
elephant collapsing
shocked with methamphetamines
poised on crumbling ramparts
overlooking seas of swamp water
pulsed with armies of electric eels
you can't work
organs revolt
no sanctuary
for a brain
seemingly pointed
only toward death
till some nautical boundary
is crossed
the senses calm
like the equation
for a nuclear explosion
gradually erasing itself
clumped numbers
alphabet city lines
cryptic clusters dissolving
until all that remains is
the empty board
permitting
different formulas
of perception
finally

Three Dads

 


When I ran across him
In the cafe
He was editing the 200 Sonnets
He'd written 20 years ago
As a grand move
In order to make it so
He could stop writing
And focus only on painting
(It didn't work
He still does both)
I said I'm at my folks' house
And my dad
Is several miles
To the right
Of Ronald Reagan
When he worked
In the Boston post office
In the 60s
They called him Little Barry
"After Barry Goldwater"
The poet painter said
He told me that in 1963
His 3rd grade teacher had him
Read a Goldwater speech
For a presidential
Debate done by 8-year-olds
Only he couldn't stop
Laughing every few lines
Then said that
Around the time
He completed the 200 sonnets
His father the newspaper humorist
Passed away & he recited me
The poem his dad
Wrote for him
When he was only three
He said he'd probably
Spoken it 500 times
In the rhyming verse
The three-year-old
Approaches a robin
And the robin hops away
Now it was 2024
And my dad was still
Hopping away toward
Aggrieved distant angry men
And even toward a madman
From Queens who was
Beating up kids at a military
Academy while my dad
Was looking around trying
To find his father

First Time (monologue)

What would it be like to live back then in Germany, Rwanda, Myanmar, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur or even in the US pushing west and bringing people in chains across the ocean from the east? What were they thinking?! We would not seal people into a walled zone, rain down bombs like a metallic meteor shower and stop food from entering the zone. Because that's not who we are. Or if we did, we would have a damn good reason why... We would not destroy universities, historical archives, museums, mosques, churches, archaeological sites, the history of a people...'Sometimes you must destroy a village in order to save it.' Ha ha. They said that in Vietnam and that was wrong. But a firm hand is sometimes needed when children are not really children but merely 3 foot-tall terrorists, hating & plotting your death. Because every man who attacked was once a boy and this boy came from a mother, and she must also be killed, and her mother too, of course, it's only logical... Wait, now that sounds fanatical and deranged. And we are not fanatical and deranged. But there always had to be a first time. There had to be a first time when eliminating a people really was justified. It's sad. It's a tragedy, but this time it's true. Every other time was a lie. This time it's true. It must be.


(painting by Robert Motherwell)