The veneer.

The window let our margin of September run across us.

Pretty girls are wizards.

Everybody, at once, the chorus of "No Expectations."

Everybody, at once, our species of

Gray finish.

Fainting spell.

My near dark cherries,
The ones I gathered,
There in the picture you took over the weekend,
Arcs of blood and
Hurricanes don't accomplish that with the will

With the Arms
With cherries.

My cherries,
On a marble step.

Blue flower.

Picture from Gugging, Vienna.


As a kid I would look at explosive flowers near me

And

See them coming
And going.

Intimacy.

From the Prinzhorn Collection (Heidelberg 1880s)

The lasting copy

Leaves a mold.

Flakes.

A period of grief.

It was copied by desperate hands.

New swan.

Rembrandt Self Portrait (Dutch 1630's?)

For the convalescence of Mr. Leonard Cohen, with warmest humor.


In a dream
Or an article--

I can't exactly remember

They concocted a new swan.

It could talk and play cards with you.

It kept you occupied while you adored the world.

The reconnassaince of memory..

Robert Capa The Beach (American 1945)

We didn't steal parsley roiling in a cove of butter from the French,
We didn't steal olive oil and tomato rubies from the Italian.

We didn't steal the pig, the cashews.

Have you come to me so hungry that nothing else mattered?!

Not what we stole do I so thirst to crawl and bring to you,
But what we rescued.

Sure shot.

George Wesley Bellows Stag at Sharkey's (American 1909)

The way the odds went to shit, and they shook their tickets salaciously, and it was Goliath in the first in all the papers...

The way they thought they'd make money from the sure shot.

The way it all just seemed inevitable and we were even thinking about going home.

The way he fell.

I can't stop;

The way our fears bloomed felicitous and were odd to us and with a torn away jaw his scream seized the air and you said so.

And the way he fell. And the way he fell. And we watched.

London.

Still from Georges-Henri Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (French 1953)

For Jamonn Campbell.



In an overwhelmed hostel
They let me sleep there.

Mike Tyson bit some dude's ear off,


And the Bells explained why rain was rain
And the Dearth was the Dearth.

Perishability, wet with honey.

Jean Dubuffet Smiling Face (French 1948)

For Fishantena.



How stuck,
And sticky,

My fingers have been blotted out by the
Delivery of skin.

My hands are ashen reminders,
My.

There are leaves of you that have been torn out of me.

You're pink where we meet.
And my tongue pierces your fingers
between the sun.

And maybe your dreams.

John Sloan Red Kimono on the Roof (American 1912)

Try not to.

Take the rest.

Total love generation must die.

Tea.

This world is being enveloped in a voluptuous shadow.

This is holding the servitude of me

That,

Til now, I haven't been able
To negotiate.

Shock.

Amedeo Modigliani - Nude (Italian-French 1912)

The way we opine,
That's the way we dream.


That's the way we have come into unknighted agreement
With colors.

To say, "Yes, you", and "Yes, you"

and, dipping sword point on shoulder, and
Stolen from the light,

"I haven't time to eat."

and

"Give over, be swarming and all blood is wheat and sugar."

Some of those girls were born from strawberries.

I need to lie.

Jenny Holzer - Public Art (American recent)

Her ivory toes sinking into a bath of
Grapes.

Or, at least, her watching that happen.

On the show.

Don't we invariably caress the same pictures of what we like?

(I feel myself shouting it.)

Spanish harlem.

For Trout.



Can't the little things scuff me?!

I have been intent upon listening
Pouring the volume of me through
The mesh.

The cracked-up 'Kind of Blue' I won because of an owner's suicide,

The Otis Clay

'The Only Way is Up'

It skips.

The Roberta Flack, the market says its worthless...

But it runs and its flushness blushes on the brim.
When my ears are open it is a creaking wilderness.
The terrior of nighttime presses me
And olive oil runs from my eyes...

Be kind to me.

Banksy Street Flower (British recent)

The unobserved flickers and is
Innocent.

Only your suspicion can
Corrupt it.

Be kind to the prevalences of wishfulness.

Be kind to me, too.

Lucky light.

Kathe Kollwitz (German 1940's?)


The light, the lucky light!

The compilation of laundry, bottles, and every
Mixtape had Suicide's "Sweetheart" on it.

Run, these wolves I feed...

Just run.

Everything tastes like candy.

Willem De Kooning - Lucifer (Dutch American 1947)

Everything tastes like candy when you've been
--lost at sea.

"Instead of time."

You know how bullshit makes me dizzy. Well, this morning I awoke with a can of Tecate in my hand, pretty much unclothed, and, without so much as a fashionable iota, carried my sorry ass to the record heap and drew Barbirolli conducting Mahler's 9th. I tell you what, there outta be a separate jail for assholes like this. This is the composition that actually makes me look forward to dying! It's radiance is immeasurable. It's philosophical import can hardly be exaggerated. But somehow this Barbirolli cunt managed to deflavor it to such a pulpy shitmass that I almost feel like I'm stuck in front of one of those goddamned Star Wars movies with music by John Whatshisfuck.

The silver living to this fecal puff is that upon reaching the turntable I found that my roommate had swallowed a hard and baffling Steelers loss to the FUCKING BEARS by spinning out the evening to Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours. I tell you what, it must take a grown up fucking guy to lose Ava Gardner. I don't envy him that. Anyway, I mention it because the notion that there are people between the rural lights of our land dozing off to that record almost makes up for Tim Geithner and the bloodsuck casuistry that is rapidly developing as the Obama administration. And by the way, if you think a healthy fucking slice of our President's detractors are not racist cunts then kindly wake up while any given placard is being waved cariacaturing him as a monkey. Fuck them, but double fuck you. Alright, my beer's getting warm and I think the sun might be coming up.

First, the sea.

James Abbott McNeil Whistler (attributed) Untitled seascape (American 19 c.)

First the sea, and I will gain everything from this.

How do I get away from You?
Closer to You?

I've lost everything in the white circles and
You, Drenching and Swollen Drenching Superiority

You host everything.

I can't come back.
If I begged and left the rent motes of my pride,
And begged
And if I came to you with my bare arms,
And without surprise, gainless,
And without anything in my dry throat but the reaching for You

Could I come back and belong to You?

I know. I know. I see the way It lights on You. Let me sit here.

Social studies.

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (British 1989?)

People who think about social studies fall in love.
People who think about love are around,
Their bikes chained to a stickered pole,
And the bank is still open.

Butcher shop curiosity.

Edward Hopper Sun in an Empty Room (American Eventually)

After all this civility, this.

A mouse idling by a heap of pulpy fingers.

Eventually the door sign flips over and

The vermin digests his food in an ambient

Slant.

On fire.

Still of Renee Jeanne Falconetti from Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (French 1928)

The differences between man and child can be reduced to this general observation. Ask each to draw a human hand. Allow that each mistakenly draws it with only four fingers. Allow each to correct. The child draws a new finger over top the established hand--his architectural genuis permits. The man accepts the defect. Everything, its warmth.

In the hearts, on paper.

Caravaggio - St. Jerome (Italian 1606)

It rises in the final dew and kids are drunk.

There is a plant I discovered that grows,
Unwilling to give us its salve.

It has escaped from our usage,
It is inhabitant--it is out there,
Uncut.

Look first for the speckling, as speckling
occurs all around.

The disturbance of a breeze, too,
Is a dead giveaway.
A fungus nearby,

Also the sun.

Bring a notebook to document the leaves,
The throaty stem,
The stamen...

Oh sure, I know what you're thinking.

A repottable mum

The error in discovery lies lifting in the hearts of the searchers
Even before the fact, which is why, among other things,
The kids are drunk.

Shark sandwich.

Dedicated to my pals, Todd & Danielle, out in Bowling Green, and to the great poet, F.A. Nettelbeck, all of whom have stirred this shit loose.

Because it was a gift, and with uncompelled great humor am I listening to, for the first time, George Wright's 1957 Hammond stir-up record, George Wright Plays the Hotsy Totsy Organ. It's an amusing thing from a time when the sexiest thing around was a girl's knees. Anyhow, it's incredibly shitty and reminds me of a product called Hotsy Totsy, which is a caustic used to clean deep fryers in restaurant kitchens. There is a spider the size of the moon blocking the moonlight, and if I were fucking Napoleon I couldn't say with more strident conviction, I am in love with this thing.

The flapper on the sleeve is kinda janky, but I probably wouldn't kick her out of bed. Who knows.

Seeing.

Edward Hopper Cape Cod Morning (American 1950)

When I was a kid the scariest thing I could imagine was being the guy who set the window glass in the top floors of skyscrapers. Each time the same image materialized as my palms iced over. The pane tilts and he uses the pressure from his chest to push it into the fitting.. There is no rope to suspend him, no ledge. He's just standing there in midair, with the white sky flashing on the perimeter of a new room.

Later in life I would find the long gaze in that guy's eyes in the paintings of Edward Hopper. One in particular portrays a beautiful woman leaning against a bay window, her gaze carrying across a repeating line of trees. They share this incidental blindness, one that captures nothing of the moment, the immediate, but has no trouble taking in the heartbreak of what lies beyond it. Like they share a curse; they cannot be surprised.

About girls.

"I came here today to talk to y'all about girls. And I know, I got a good crowd, and y'couldn't ask for a more beautiful day. But my car just got towed, and everything costs money."

If sincerity was raw onions.

Willem de Kooning The Door to Something or Other (Dutch-American 1960)

Just picture it,
Which sounds strange,
Talking about the taste.


But do.

Picture how it ruptures,
How the senses change.

Alit.

Mary Cassatt-Breakfast (French1897)

"Most of these people are only gonna remember how he come down on one wheel like un, but it took practice to do that. Damn, it's raining again."

Decent bread.

Begin with the weakest,
Developing
Foam.
Okay, use that encouragement:

You have watched it bloom from a thread.
You have known it all along,
Now gather it.

It's bullion has been cast long and thin on us all.

With this readiness and no other could you remain
Black
In your varied
Patience.

Oh now.

Unattributed photo of Josephine Baker (1927)

The lead is open to sensation,
That's all the stage direction he gets.

There is an ebony table battered with mail and a feather like the hectic one they used to write with.

And he is open to sensation.

The miracle worker.

Edouard Manet The Lemon (French 1880)

Kafka's letter to his father was well over a hundred pages long when his mother decided not to give it to him. Perhaps the distinguishing aspect of the contemporaneity is our mutual unrest over when one is on. I never used to say I love on. But now, I love on. I love on.

Liebestraum.

Joan Mitchell Chord VII (American 1987)

Glass, plastic, dog, window glass, plastic, reconstituted paper, glass, canary image, pile, can, remote controls, decoration, picture, leather (sorry), vinyl, reconstituted paper, toilet paper, carpet, the left side of my face, key metal, glass, window, condensation, glass immediately, my lips, vinyl, ocean, ocean, ocean, glass, paramedic speaking yinzer, why can't I find the 78 of fucking Spike Jones doing Liebestraum?

The aesthetic of decay.

John White Alexander Repose (American 1895)

I was in eleventh grade when I drove with some friends to see Leonard Cohen sing at a concert hall in New Jersey. He did "First We Take Manhattan", and between the backs of two well-dressed women I could see Mr. Cohen memorially holding a diamond bracelet in his hand as he sang about one place, then another, then jail. Of all the love songs a guy could sing, his had to touch upon world domination. Even in eleventh grade, inexplicably, that made sense to me.

Vertigo dream (9/7/9).

Gerhard Richter Zwei Liebessare (German recent)

How silly it felt to climb the taller,
More daunting tower,
Having fought the guard and left him down--lungs
Full,
Only to see the peculiarity there
And look across--
It was the other one:

The unguarded one,
With no staircase
To the top--

The rich recipient
Of moonlight,
It eschews the climber,
Stranding him in a place commonly reserved for the cowardly,
Its shadow.

The opposite of flowers.

Andrew Wyeth The New Table (American 1940's?)

Once it would've made sense to arrive with flowers in hand,
Maybe because, for the occasion, they always did,
Or for the violent introduction of color,
The waning flush of providence: severed,

And then bandaged.

See them in one's arms, another's
Arms, standing together on a table between
Bouts of dishes smeared and visited between nightly dinings--as if
Ingeniously inserting a comma at the hour.

With what unprecedented kindness did someone finally
Recognize that they're in the way, lowering an inch each day
As if embarrassed, drooping under the burden of disarticulation?

And in doing so did he imagine the heart without exercise, or did he clean everything first,
With new plans for the clearing he cut?

The brighter world below.

Saturday morning. A quick word before work.

Nothing remarkable about it, but leaking over like a bag of transplant-grade human kidneys onto the couch last evening, with that familiar dubious scrapple odor even the dog won't sniff more than twice, I somehow managed to work the arcade crane game I call a right arm--the left is more in the family of a putrescent scallion, to play a nice record of Vasary's Chopin.

I mention it because there are moments when connections to that brighter world are scarce, and in their scarcity the urgency brightens with its surroundings--and in doing so do we observe how some are best that way. When one is down another says, 'It's alright pal, I've been there'. Must we not look to the surface where the sun above is already striking and say, too, 'I've been there'?

I'd like to think so--and so plainly, as if only in the self-dignification that emboldens speech above sleeping expression where we are--you can rely on this, not found for one another.

Also, I just wanted to recommend Tamas Vasary's Chopin (Deutsche Grammophon ST 136 452).

And a good morning to you.

The bounty of the commonwealth.

There's an old adage that I--likely in error, correlate with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and hope one day to find on our license plate. It reads:

Until you've actually palmed forcefully and squeezed clean the juice of a charred lemon on a garden tomato in your hour, salt, pepper, thyme and the reproductive touch of the sun attendant, and punched your dumbass uncle out cold before he could go mushy and cry drunk you just have not tasted the Living such and such and so forth.

Common evening primrose.

"Heaven assumed shoulders high in the room."
-R.E.M.,-'Perfect Circle'

"Even this horse will founder backward
to coin, cannon, and domestic pots..."
-Kay Ryan, 'All Shall Be Restored'


The worst is how recombinant this
Wisdom is and it is

And it defeathers and it's reluctant,

And--open a window,
It's reluctant!--
And if I was just a fun patch of elbows I'd
Roll in the field, like that
Giant recreational ball in Spain
People pay money to ride
Wearing pads and cameras
Rolling,

Which of course costs nothing
To the ball and field.

This includes complimentary light and its swift
Pollinated angles.

*Charles M Schulz 'Lucy' (American 1950's)

Limited pliability.

This started as a status update on Facebook, which is a horrible thing to admit.

I was driving my roommate's car to work this morning when the Aerosmith song "Rag Doll" came on the radio. I left my body and traveled over the heads of all those souls to whom this shit was being marketed. From above I could see the wear marks, how at first they resisted, then grew weary, and wearier still, finally arriving at a broken state half surrender, half hypnosis. The song is about a rag doll who lives "in the movies" and does other things. There's a sexual undercurrent and a sense of narrative empowerment fleshed out in the phrase "Yes I'm movin'/I'm really movin." I ended up so far beyond where I needed to be, probably just trying to escape that condescending smother pattern of car ad-car ad-Aerosmith ad-car ad-car-car ad.

And I thought about what I loved, how to my way of thinking it was different, and that if I belonged to the other world, the one below, I would probably not mind so much being that one generally takes the intellectual and empiricial tenor of his own being as a point of limited pliability.

When I got home I decided to try out an exercise in meditation. Donning an old motorcycle helmet left in the hallway by the last tenant and a pair old shop class safety goggles blacked out with electrical tape I began running headlong at the kitchen wall, repeatedly, listening to Big Youth. The idea was to replicate, not merely in the corners and depths of my body, but in a deeper state of being that wild, comical expression he uses that goes something like:

Heeeeeh...

Supplementary moonlight.

Julia Roxburgh Tea cups (British recent)


The group had arrived at the three week-marker of Mike's bachelor party when I just sorta snapped into an incredible wild peace.

I don't know which of big Bill's sorrows are sweeter, that this party's over or that I can't use the light as an excuse any longer--with a straight face. I sounded like a douche when I tried to talk--just never quite got the tone right, but also, in my defense and in defense of that peace through which some hue of self-love must have run--without the screeching din of narcissism for once--never quite got that 'shut up dummy' self-incrimination blue. Line of the evening came in Mike's puzzling over an old girlfriend, saying he couldn't believe they ever had sex because they were so bone-skinny that their hips colliding must've sounded like someone "banging together two tea cups". Later I tried to pass along some mac & cheese to foxy girls at The Castel but what came out was a bunch of leery words coated too thickly in vomit and too thinly in platonic diplomacy to not earn a slap in the face. How did I not get slapped in the face. Maybe I got slapped in the face. Also I think we watched Steel Magnolias.

Anyhow I awoke in a fugue moment, with a hot cup of coffee in one hand, re-reading a favorite old New York Times article, this one on the notorious pianist/fraud, Joyce Hatto. Regaining my wits I showered and, in dressing, discovered the distilled essence of my baseness: I refuse to spend a few bucks at a drug store for a sewing kit to mend up the hole in my shorts out of which my dick keeps falling at inappropriate times.

But I'm not gonna let myself get all bent out of shape over it. Please pardon all ensuing and prior instances of blurting nudity. I'd truthfully do the same for you.

Nothing to be done.

I got myself good and superbly drunk the other night, hanging out with Crystal. It was late and she didn't want to get a ride with the guy she came with. She spent the walk home asking me why this guy (a different guy) wouldn't come around, and I pretty much asked her the same thing about a girl. In the end it was just a lot of me telling her that she's pretty and everything---which she is, I wasn't lying. But there was this one great moment when she dumped her bag on Brereton because she'd lost her keys. We went back to Gooski's, to where she had been sitting and the tall Italian dude who looked like Max Von Sydow and definitely had a neat design mapped out for himself and her and didn't like me on account of it was still sitting there, grousing about it. She poked her head in the door and in her apologetic voice, which come to think about it she has an apologetic voice all around, said, "I'm just looking for my keys." I poked in because I just wanted to see the gang again and it just seemed kind of funny. Besides I'm sure it burned that dude up pretty bad. What a dump.