Monday, March 31, 2025
IF WE COULD LEAP TALL BUILDINGS
Friday, May 19, 2023
THE KENSINGTON BEAT
There are drum solos rumbling down the avenue
where storefront lights burn into the dark
and get diffuse in the
amber glare of bottles and rim shots clinking and reporting
the news of the night:
Yes, we have to go to work again on Monday,
only planets have converged,
lined up in a way that leaves my gravity and shoreline alone,
the highest satellite dish we see tonight
will still be there
in the morning with
birds sitting on them, tennis shoes hanging from them,
giving someone so many sharp moving pictures of
moronic diversions.
Everyone steps up and takes a solo on the melody that becomes the
tattoo on the big shoulder of the crowd that leans into the wall of sound that
each player powers their riffs against, yes, it’s dark outside, the streetlight cannot burn away the black or the mist that surrounds the glow,
I consider bills to pay, bills to pay,
your face smiling or looking down,
at that point when you think you’re alone,
whistling and singing
the trilling ends of
famous Hendrix riffs, gutter growl,
whammy bar tirade, ostinatos and legato salvo, tongue triple timing
imperfect harmony with sonic
bitch slap pick harmonic tooth grinding chop heaven,
screams go across the night, I think of you singing whole
sections of
Axis, Bold as Love
when I got home early years ago,
you had all the kitchen gadgets grinding, the stereo
blasting, you
had your voice unleashed in vowels and consonants
riffing in sustained syllabics that
kept away the lurking edge of the night
that would come over the horizon
and up the street
on tiny feet
and bring with it a wake of
wasted blackness that swallowed all
All there is left to do is sing
and consider bills to pay,
Warm nights and drum solos
from the back of the Kensington Club
where my brother plays
and demonstrates
the history of sticks
on drum heads, what the hands do when
getting busy is the business,
Everyone gets to take a solo,
to rail their music against the wall of sound,
the night abates; it gives up its claim
on your division of city street and passes you
as singing
to yourself burns a black smoke
and sparking fabric of sheer emotion
that life stories end up as notes on sheet music
in an arrangement that seems to give we room to
stretch and take our time, to talk to the ends of our existence
so far
and burnish the ends of
our trilling and thrilling cadenzas with a name
that announces itself as part of that
invisible “it”
that is the nature of the street, the kiss of the town you live in,
There are drums the spill out of the doors
and on the street
we go back to
in order to find other streets
to find our beds
before the sun rises over the
eastern mountains and chases the dark back to its recesses,
making this world safe for money.
But tonight, there are drums, a song,
step to the mike, take a solo,
it’s all yours
for 32 bars,
or sunrise.
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
THE LOCUSTS HAVE NO KING
a novel by Dawn Powell
A New York comedy of manners set in the Forties, it concerns a married couple comprised of a famous playwright and her husband, an academic who labors at his specialty in obscurity. While successful in this discipline, the husband works away in his obscure scholarly endeavors, known by virtually no one saves for a handful of peers. At the same time, the wife is the toast of Broadway, blessed with hit after hit, loads of favorable reviews, and admiring tidbits in all the newspapers. Fate, or some other cruel force that loves to upset the smug and arrogant expectations, works so that the husband gains great notoriety for the research he's been pouring over for years, even breaking through to what was then the mainstream media.
At the same time, the wife must deal with a box office bomb and negative reviews, items that have her reputation sliding quickly down the social ladder. Powell is one of the better comic writers we've had --a spikier Edith Wharton, shall we say, a funnier Thomas Hardy (think of Mayor of Casterbridge)--who provides momentum, atmosphere, and rich, crackling dialogue in this many -charactered satire. This would be the sort of novel Tom Wolfe has been trying to write for years. Powell's dialogue is crisp, curt and telling in what it reveals about the characters, and the prose has a jazzy feel too it, a lightly worn eloquence that doesn't smother the momentum. Tall buildings, over decorated apartments, and rattta-tat bustle of agendas being advanced, abandoned Big Apple bring us a comedy of hubris.
More about Wolfe-as-novelist, he lacks the precision of detail, character quirks and reveals himself to be a rather drifting plotter. The arcs of his novels lack the efficient forward movement of Powell, who has the sense along with the aforementioned Hardy that fate, triggered by seemingly insignificant gestures, remarks, or stray, condemning thoughts, results in reversals of fortunes, either comic or tragic. We are fortunate Powell opts for the comic. Wolfe piles it on, sentence after sentence, clause after clause, until he suffocates the good ideas he might have hard. Powell keeps us intrigued as to how much deeper the characters in question can deepen the hole they're in. We have here a situation where the fortunes of a famous wife and unknown husband are suddenly and realistically reversed, a turn that reveals the shallow relations and loyalties tied as they are to one's fortunes. Or lack of them.
Sunday, April 18, 2021
DON'T SMILE TOO FAST
Try not to smile
too fast in crowded places
like elevators
or even at
intersections where you
are waiting
in your car,
drumming the stirring wheel
and sipping scalding coffee
in a cardboard cup:
the citizens around
might feel left out
of the game|
they think you're playing
and begin to tell
you stories of
the private deeds
as as the elevator
slithers open on your floor,
the dull bell
pinging like
a decade's worth of old headaches,
or even as
the lights change
and traffic begins to move
and your coffee has
spilt in your lap
making you scream
and the fool in the next car,
not moving despite car horns
and swear words,
smiles when he pauses his
woe to you through his
driver's side window,
thinking your howling
is a sign of commiseration,
empathy rather than agony,.
Yeah,that joke wasn't worth remembering,
her kiss wasn't that sweet,
last weekend wasn't
that wonderful,
tell yourself whatever
you have too
and remember
the examples,
don't smile too fast
and don't drive
with coffee
nestled between
your thighs
contained
in fragile cardboard, ok?
Saturday, July 20, 2019
THE MOMENT OF THE WORLD
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
page not found
not the voice that comes
from the steam
nor the tide that turns
at the drop of a dime
into a newspaper machine.
not a name that fades in the ear
when you turn a corner
nor a name that comes through the
earpiece of your phone that
rings at the dinner hour.
not a lover who misses you
after all the years in jobs
on a far coast where time zones and
temperatures are closer and hotter
that the hotel sheets
are to the mattress where you stare
at the door to the hallway,
the shadows of feet passing in
the middle of the night,
you wonder what your lover
has to say,
not about this meal you're eating
or by what you're reading
but
in this world when
nothing seems real enough to
count on as if life itself mattered,
always in the moments when
we're required to be
the selves we've always rehearsed in
and interrogations,
the first time
the book you were reading
to dress for openings, dinner,
the masks crack and fall to the floor
and suddenly, powerfully
it’s clenched fists in public places,
the world
it's all those things
every
on the fireplace, there's nothing
that
in front of me, passing by and gone
like a road sign that couldn’t
Thursday, December 13, 2018
SHE LIKES A WITH A SHAVE
She likes a man with a shave
and a room temperature IQ
who can trips over his words
‘though he hasn’t spoken
for weeks and months and more.
brawling on avenues
and twisting streetlights
around the neck of the other
over a friendly
dispute over which one of them
is going to pay the bill.
Abbott and Costello,
matching pairs of
the same dark impulse
to play in traffic
and keep score besides.
he hasn’t spoken,
he is hit by buses
he didn’t see coming,
he is always flat on the asphalt
staring into what remains of heaven,
circles of planets, stars, and singing birds
and some notion that
he might have been someone named
Roland Barthes getting pulverized
by a laundry truck
in a city where words
are loud as car horns
screaming in configurations
that cannot be untied.
above all else,
cute animals
destroying
hungry wolves and
wretched vermin
endlessly in variations
that allow them to
eternally return to
the sparely drawn
desert-scape where
the only laundry truck
within 1,000 miles
in any direction
will find them
and collide with their heads
and flatten their bodies
like sheets of wax paper
just as they
are about to claim their feasts,
amid all their famine.
turns out badly, she thinks,
I need a man
the way a man
needs a shave.