The Best Cigarette

I know that many friends of mine do not smoke and infact are quite vocal about how much the detest it and our stink we carry with us and our yellowed teeth and our coughing and our disregard for our health, but this poem, is all too true about the act of smoking and those moments that you have/had with smoking that are unlike any other moment there is.  Not better, just different.

The Best Cigarette
by Billy Collins

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Lorca 113th birthday, Poem below published by BARE HANDS POETRY: ISSUE #1

     It just seemed worth noting.  Well, for one, its Federico Garcia Lorca and when isn't he worth noting.  Secondly, may father and I just happened to be speaking about him at dinner last night, about his death, about the early days of the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's arrival onto the mainland to begin his 3 year campaign to impose Falangist rule over the Iberian Peninsula, more or less.  My father, well, he is of another breed, an old school fascist mentality, bred from upper middle class, lower-fading-out aristocracy of Northern Italian post-WW2 culture and so every now and then he says "Viva Franco", "Viva El Caudillo". 
     What can I say, he seems to have sympathy for the murder of a young poet who supported the leftist government yet dined frequently with Falangist party members, old friends of his.  Old friends who almost lost their lives for being friends with Lorca and of course, nothing could stop the impending death that  made its way to Lorca's  home that August 19th, 1936 to drag him from his safety, up to the hills in the darkness, to quiet his canta honda and who knows how it went down for sure.  Did they kill all the other men first, to make Lorca watch and then turn the gun on him?  Did they beat him and then as they rained down anti-homosexual slurs and kicks, put the gun up his ass and pull the trigger.  Did they blow his brains out and burn his corpse in a heap with the others.  Its no little thing that all those other men who died with him have names that I don't know, for that I apologize.  Being a murdered poet doesn't make you better than any other murdered man, you just get more recognition is all. 
     Either way, it just happened that we were speaking about Garcia Lorca and to my surprise, between my father's salutes to El Caudillo and the stories relayed to him by the Silvia Bernanos, a friend of my fathers and the wife of poète et auteur fantastique, Michel Bernanos, who spent time in Spain during the Spanish Civil war along with his father and minor French philosopher, George Bernanos, my father began quoting Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias: "At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon..." 

     All this prompted me to look up some of Lorca's poem, poems which I have not looked at for half a dozen years or so, mainly since 2003 when I was in Spain, I have put Lorca aside for other writer's and poets and novels etc, thinking Lorca has already served his purpose but alas, he is never done assisting me, from far beyond my comprehension, another time, another way of life, another scent of death I cannot relate to, he comes back on his very birthday of 113 years and reignites my yearning for my own canta honda and I am close to his age when he died and I have very little to show for it, no pity party, just one of those strange occurences in life, Keats dies at 24 and produces some of the greatest poetry written in the English language.  Rimbaud writes from the age of 14-19 and then stops, but in that time period writes exceptional poetry; father of the modern poet, or so some call him and yet he was but a child.  Lorca, writes from a young age, acts and plays music deeply, flamenco and the songs of the gitano, guitar and piano and produces plays and does all these things with a passion I have yet to unearth in my self.   It astounds me.  I will take as much and as little as I can get, when I can get it and Lorca, even though The Clash say in their song Spanish Bombs that you are "dead and gone...", you are never far away, never gone.  To The Clash, I know, you don't mean it like 'that', it just helped me end this blog.  Love your Spanish Bombs.  "Viva Lorca, viva"

For Lorca, on his 113th birthday


I dine
on your memory,

on the weeping of the last, slow sunset,

on the weeping of a long, hot wind

that stills itself at the very
mention of your death

and maybe no one
ever truly sleeps at all,

but it was in dreams that
you showed your face to me,

your bullet riddled smile,

and I wept for you,

from the corners of the morning,
from the cracks of your whitewashed walls
where the sunlight still dances
to la canta honda.

I dine

on your memory,

and I can't get enough of your face,
perched upon the curl of  your hand,
your blood, split recklessly upon the soil,
where it burned beside the oranges.

Where you gonna run to...

"I said Lord, please help me Lord, can't you see I'm praying. But the Lord said, Go to the Devil....so I ran to the Devil, he was waiting, I ran to the Devil and I cried out, powerrrrrr, powerrrrrrrr!"

So todays nonsense of a Rapture has come and gone.  May 21st, 2011. 

Quote from 'Triggering Town' by Richard Hugo

Hey Wally, i still didn't forget about you....I am such a private poet, and I am working hard to not be restricted by my obsessiveness.

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn't bother me
that the word "stone" appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that "wind" and "gray"
appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn't use them that often
I'd be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same
poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost's statement that he
tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it
couldn't be.

Sheenless

Sheen-less

The uneasiness

leaves me wool
grey-eyed and sheen-less,

clumped lifeless, a lump
of lint in a belly button,

unsettling the mind

like warm pillows
in the summertime.

The voice that we wait for,

the weight of the air
that irritates,

like mosquitoes chattering
in the endless night.

The Public House

PUBLISHED IN THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition



The Public House

The public house
challenges me to a duel again.
I walk to it as though
I intend to answer.

Behind the sky
the great senseless
eye un-blinks at me.

The clouds roll overhead
like knotted mounds of change  
as I go shuffling along into
a field of a lesser yield.

The harvest:
bloated gobs of shadow,
the overgrowth of the forgotten
and the tomorrow nights.

In the bar room haze,
we keep to a steady sway,
clinging to the drinks in hand

and howling
to the rafters
like a naked choir
in the Church of night.

We clink
our hanging heads
in obscurity,

little mechanical phantoms,
grazing together on the edges
of a muffled horizon.

A glimpse of the eternal(2003)

I counted the steps today

on my way out of the apartment.
It's not uncommon. Children do it all the time.

When I was little, I was always counting.

I always hope a staircase will have precisely eleven steps.

Eleven is the number that matters,

two lines running ever parallel.

You can't say the word parallel

without evoking the spirit of eleven

--a manifestation of some primordial magic!

In separating things, we are forever linked!

It is not uncommon.

Baseball players and golfers do it. 
Musicians, accountants, actors

and suicide bombers do it.

Maybe even big boss Bush does it,

"seven blinks in the left eye, five on the right

and now I'm ready for a thorough lie-fiesta, yee haw!" 

While we are on common, well understood themes,
Time, that other deceiver, catches me in its voracious jaws

and joins in on the fun; chews my mind like a licorice twig.


I don't wear wrist watches anymore, especially the digital ones.

My mother says to me, "when are you going to join the adult world
and get yourself a watch. Maybe for Christmas, I'll buy you one."


I turn her down. I cannot wear them anymore.
At first it was a playful thing, silly fun, then I became addicted.
"Look", I'd say to my friends and family, "1:01 and 01 seconds".  

A minute later, waiting to pounce on it,

"look now, 1:02 and 01 seconds". The apex of it all,

exhausted in a sweat of obsessive delirium,

"look, look, 1:11 and 11 seconds."

Five ones in a row, my straight-line guides to infinity. 

They mean that I have somehow captured the eternal.

They mean, nothing at all! 


All day I would be trapped like this, in a cage of moments.
When I saw a clock change to 1:23 and 45 seconds,
I thought I was using my time appropriately. 

Sorry mom, wrist watches are forever banished.


Pocket watches I can manage. 
If I have to reach into my pocket to get the watch,
Without really wanting to know the time for practical purposes,
my mind becomes aware of the pending lunacy
and the mania fizzles out with a series of deep breathes.

Something about symmetry, inherent and omnipotent;
Numbers, sidewalk squares and bathroom tiles. They soothe me.


I'm tracking the quiet movement of things,

propelled by a need to know.  I'm aware of the patterns,

keeping control on top of a bubbling planet!

Its not so bad anymore, not that I care much for those terms
That bind us to our fears, the phobias and the disorders.
Yet sometimes I search the bricks on buildings

or count the drops from a leaking faucet,

--at eleven I start all over again, 'again and again, 

--always eleven, eleven, my control and my relief!

We children who become men...

We children who become men

We children who become men

I will not speak for everyone.

In fact, I am less and less comfortable

with the 'we' as the years go on.

We children who go fast becoming men,

we who might not pan out before the day's end.

I will not educate with my experience,

you will learn by watching all the others,

we children steeped in our becoming

and the empty shell casings of our undoing.

Then there is the matter of my family.

Among that 'love' I am the last to let them know.

Among that 'we' I am the last to let it go.

I will not speak for everyone,

because so many, they may have chosen to forget,

we, the children who resist becoming men.

Outside the word

In the safety of skin

You have to know when to keep certain things separate, its a delicate trick.  It may seem like a fine idea to put some people among the snakes but in the end, the snakes would rather rest beside a hot stone and be free of bad breath and snapshot judgments.  "We are not the same" they'll say,  "It is you who created the devil, who laugh at the moon and sea and masterbate all over the quiet face of goodness.  It is you, not us."