What are you looking at?

a poem-- to New York, from New York

What are you looking at?

I’ve noticed you’ve been staring at me and of course,

behind my severity I adore the attention, but I won’t return the gaze,

well, only for a second, but the look will make you wish you were dead,

and why not, you’ve spit upon my streets, you’ve stained them with old gum,

murder and urine; you’ve hollowed me out with hot metal and traveling things.

You’ve dressed me up in endless layers of deception, advertisements

and corporate agendas and don’t you think for one moment that I haven’t

noticed how you’ve bolted and bridged me together to garner the praise

of your engineering cronies, how you’ve tried so hard to drown out the displaced

and woeful cries of our no income housing with your foodie network channels.

You’ve brought me shit and silver, the gold and the dregs of the world.

You’ve poked me through and through till I bled steam into the night.

You’ve covered my walls with lead and soot, but buffed away the spray painted

voices of the nameless masses, silenced by your appraisals of property value

and I can see you now, staring at me, but I won’t return your gaze because

it’s  hard for a city like me to let down her guard and I’ve yet to forgive you for blinding me

with all the goddamned flashing artificiality, strewn across my boulevards and rooftops,

covering these old eyes and disconnecting me from my one true affection;

that handsome pitch black darkness and his dimples of a billion lights. 

I cannot forgive you for making his stars and sky irrelevant.

time for new material

I have pretty much officially run out of material....or have rehashed old material to death.  I need new poetry,, inspiration, you are welcome to shed your wisdom any time now.... anyday now. we are waiting.  Thank you, carry on.

Basta con le chiacchere: Artificial

Basta con le chiacchere Part 3: Artificial

1.

We entered the apartment,
where the centerpiece caught my attention,
Stretched across the living-room wall,

in between a chaos, 

the unbreakable one-eyed gaze of Christ,
Surrounded by the torn flags and ocher patches,
Bloated with umber spots and smeared 

in the bluest blotched-blue sunshine
And there, there above it all,
Ah!—Basta con le chiacchere!

2.

He stared for so long at all the colors
That he couldn’t see them anymore, 

Not via the simpler gestures of just looking  
And so he twisted his neck instead, almost to snapping
and bent over into himself, for that upside-down vista 

—its there the colors shine again, its there he reconnects with the reconnecting!

—”Do you see them,” he says
The both of us bent sideways, staring hard, 

cross-eyed for clearer vision,
“there, there they are!   How do they look from this perspective?
Its all about fresh beginnings, with everything in this life”.

I agreed.  We toasted to fresh beginnings, 
and I convinced myself free of old colors

—fresh beginnings, from traveling to poetry to painting , 

from sagging rooftop angles to sad-blue sidewalk angels—

—“new beginnings and keeping your body happy,” he declared,
grabbing for his bag of baby carrots and a carton of soy milk.
 
And almost forgetting again to be a friend he turned to me 
and said, “yeah, so, what else is new with you…”, 
and I thought;  Ah!  —Basta con le chiacchere!

Not the solution

under construction...

writer's block

just put your ass in the chair,,,,, not bloody working, pal!

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.