IF WE COULD LEAP TALL BUILDINGS

If we could leap tall buildings

in a single motion

that is unfettered and expressive

like a hitchhiking thumb

and other kinds of sign language

to passing traffic,

If the length of the road

were only the few steps

I take from my front door

to yours with no bridges to cross

nor rivers to slide through,

If perfect dreams lasted

as long as they should

and allowed us all to see the end

of the story as it concludes , resolves

and finishes with neither snow flurries

nor tears before breakfast,

If all the notes we wrote and played

mattered as much to those faces

in trolley windows staring into unoccupied space

going off to grace, calamity or more of the same,

If I could decide which irony fits me best today

so I might have it tailored and pressed until

the creases are sharp as a tongue seeking revenge

or the edge of a knife seducing another slice of cheddar,

Nothing would be the same

just as nothing would change at all

because it's not nothing that

I stand here thinking that

twenty four hours a day doesn't feel

like twenty four hours any more.

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.

 

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.

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?

 

THE MOMENT OF THE WORLD

The better words we have

are the feathers on the wings

of effervescent angels

who'd prefer the poets of the earth

to cease staring in the mirror

of their self-assigned appellation

and leave the library, the desk,

that place where the muse goes to

wither,and walk out the door,

Take the elevator down 

and then a train out of town over mountains a

nd state lines to cities for that perfect cup of coffee,

that lingering kiss on a stranger's lips,

the waiting for traffic lights

at odd intersections

and with not a clue

about which way to turn

in this unfamiliar confusion.

Our angels might take 

their feathers back

if something isn't done.

Imagine us finally 

in the Day of Miracles

with cats and dogs

saints and shitheads

having civil meals,

tending to each other's wounds

and not one of us

gets the itch and tickle

to write a word or two

wholly inadequate as witness

but scribed at the moment

of the world,

not above it.

That would be shame.

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 instead about how you're living
in this world when
nothing seems real enough to
count on as if life itself mattered,

i say all these things come back to us
always in the moments when
we're required to be
the selves we've always rehearsed in

mirrors, at home, imagining interviews
and interrogations,

i think of the way your lips grew puffy
the first time i made you cry,

the way your hand traced the words of
the book you were reading

before setting it down
to dress for openings, dinner,

where ever we might be going,
the masks crack and fall to the floor

when some meaningless phrase is said
and suddenly, powerfully

it’s clenched fists in public places,
the world is removed just then and too loud as well,

it's all those things after all,
every last cough and bottle of beer we balanced
on the fireplace, there's nothing i ever had

that i don't miss, you were everything
in front of me, passing by and gone
like a road sign that couldn’t be read.

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.

He is both Popeye and Bluto
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.

He is also Leopold and Loeb,
Abbott and Costello,
matching pairs of
the same dark impulse
to play in traffic
and keep score besides.

He trips over words
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.

She likes cartoons
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.

What goes around
turns out badly, she thinks,
I need a man
the way a man
needs a shave.

NOTICE TO ENTER

Wrap these sandwich slivers
in a paper napkin, place it
in a crumpled plastic bag
from the 7-11,
leave it by the dumpster
that's been locked
for fear the flies might escape,

Go to work
and bill every citizen
whose accounts are in arrears,
take an extra twenty minutes on
your hour lunch,
sing a happy song,
buy tickets online
for a reunion concert
of a band whose original members
are dead or are quarreling
with those who've passed on,

Pass on a chance

to get with the girl
two cubicles behind you
because everyone
is  suing everyone else
for bad pick-up lines
and suspicious gravity
around the waistline,
return emails drink more coffee,
call your sponsor,
plan a trip on Trivago
and then cancel the purchase,

Regret that you gave up smoking
because that was the only
good reason to leave the office
and hang with the inventory boys
at the loading dock,
ask an intern if they've
ever heard of Woody Woodbury,
ask the intern
if they remember the theme song
to "One Step Beyond",
update your blog
with 500 words on
why the good things
in your life
are being forgotten
or turned into
theme parks,

It's still twilight when
you get home,
the plastic sack
with the sandwich halves
is still next to the dumpster,
the napkin discolored with
the grey stain of congealed mayonnaise,
the bag is covered in flies,

And on the
black security door
of your apartment
is a notification from the management
announcing a date and time
in which they will need to enter
your space
to inspect your pipes,
your comic books,
all your bullshit,
all of it.

JAZZ CAT DREAM POEM

The armies of the night
might as well be
stray cats on a fence
having choir practice,
a twelve-tone scat fest
improvising new
metaphors for hunger
as a grey, lunar ash
covered the backyards
and corners of old buildings
that haven't been
entirely seduced by the dark.
I sat up,
a head full of conquests and amours
receding like retractable cable,
reaching for something to fill my hand,
harmonica? shoe?  Lunch Poems by O'Hara?
to be frank,
I turned on the radio
but kept the room dark,
ad-libbed Coltrane extravaganzas in the cool shadows,
got up and tripped over my shoes,
on the floor, I heard Benny Golson
stomp at the Savoy,
sweet tenor notes and
rhythms that made
skip the elevator
and take the stairs.
then there was static,
the radio was silent,
so to speak,
the darkness became deep,
the cats had found
another dark window to
haunt.
i saw your silhouette
as you sat up
in the bed
and asked 

what the matter was
and I said I was dreaming
of moons and music,
serenades under many stars
and thought I heard
you laugh,

and
then realized
after getting to my feet
that
you were not there,
still absent,
somewhere beyond
the window drapes, the city’s skyline,
the night itself and the day that follows.

POEM ABOUT POETRY WITH PLAGIARIZED FIRST LINE

Poetry makes nothing happen
other than making our tongues
wag at one another and our
brains send words to our limbs
to suggest a proper hand gesture
to underscore a swift lyric response
and to undercut the boogeyman
peeking around the corner
of the door frame
because one of us started humming
a light and sprite tune
when the slim collection
was closed by two calm hands
and all came to rest
sweetly in the lap.

Poetry makes nothing change
except the key the music
is played in,
the time signature
that now follows the whim,
not the metronome,
the temperature
between the ears
that rises and falls
as the senses are engaged, inflamed
and then deflated,
poetry does nothing
except make the rooms we walk
into fit us a little better
than before the first stanza
was read, exclaimed, declared at length,
these verses do nothing at all
that wits alone can measure.

Poetry is a bouquet from
the angels or our better regard,
a sharp stone in every pair of shoes,
a lover's sigh,
a boss's grunt,
a wall of wet paint that dries too slow,
friends who understand
too quickly and
grasp not a word
you've said,
assuming of course,
something rhymed
or cursed with irregular
lines mattered enough
to stop the clock and arrest our attention
with handcuffs of wonder and what the fuck was that?,

Poetry makes nothing happen,
poetry is what happens,
and nothing ever happens around here.

Top of Form

MUSIC FOR CASH REGISTERS

I could sing all night
if the lights never changed
and if the radio played this song
again and again,
it’s a riff that rubs me
the right way in traffic
it’s a chorus making downtown
a party of long ribbons
and tap shoes,
the motor purrs and growls
with each keyboard grunt
and grunting guitar,
this car just rocks
when there’s no one I have to
return it to.

This is the curse of
owning things
that merely own you in exchange,
Cars, toasters, handguns and
and magazines hug your
face with a deep kiss of need,
What I receive is nameless
and elusive, some music, some smoke,
dry ice vapors and a wallet that
floats away,
that’s how light it’s gotten,

Money is air, invisible but potent,
I owe money I’ve never seen
to people I’ve never met,
Like you, shuffling your debit cards
and saying prayers that don’t seem
to soar as high as interest rates
or blood pressure,
you should be dancing
for all the coin we owe,

This moment, right now,
on the street that vibrates
with orders on how to drive
when to cross and what to smoke
the thirty yards from the public entrance,
the world can stop and we perk our ears to
listen to an imagined needle scratching
the surface of percussive vinyl,

The bass line and the grunts of soul singers
are all the advice we need; they called decades ago
when we started to toss our cash out from
Wall Street Windows,

They advised

Do the jerk, baby,Do the jerk now!

YOU'D BE SO NICE

you'd be so nice
to walk away from
in a crowded piazza
that exists solely 
in imagination,

i can see it
anytime i want,

the crowds of small faces
and gesturing limbs
walking across the way
cathedral to cathedral,
toward the long decaying stairs
or to the fountain
tall and dry
with ruddy faced cherubs
grimacing when
love seems nothing
more than a match
in a room full of
very dry , brittle things,

and then, of course,
a large flock of
irritated pidgeons
taking flight,
flustered and fluttering
wings against
clouds the
color of old tools,

you on the bench
eating crackers and cheese
or maybe standing
as it begins to rain
and the crowd
gets thick about you
while you try to watch
me walk a line
to a vanishing point
on the horizon
between apartments
and gaudy government repairs,

yes , I would be walking
away toward a fate
obviously unplanned ,
trivial as a crossword clue,
meandering into
an anonymous history,
walking in uneven steps,
one leg longer than the other,

it begins to rain,
I won't look back,

yeah, that would be sweet.

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WONDERFUL THINGS

I talk so the birds
do not fall from the trees
and bruise their feathers
whatever the weather,

I sing so the bricks kiss the mortar

like the two were sealing a deal,
a conspiracy to grow old fall where they stand,

I dream so that you will love me
because you see my face
when I'm not looking at it
rehearsing a pose and stare
I think will send you to the stars,

I walk everywhere I go

to keep the earth spinning
where it belongs
with the other marbles,
making music that
is far from the center
yet near the heart
of wonderful things
nameless and unseen.

MINOR GRAVITY

Oh! the world is a vulgar place where the words for beauty are matched with calamities of tongue , coarse and unloved.

So we sigh and watch the flowers die a day at a time, petals curled and brown, pistel and stamen bowing to the table, hanging from the vase like dry tongues swollen in thirsty gasps.

We raise our glass to the new born babe damp and mewling the same experimental complaints, we remain in awe and transported wonder and give ourselves to regrets that the tears go by too fast,

too soon our own words will indict us for each pipe dream and in seam come undone.

Ahhh...we will lurk longer at the lake and stare into the water after we’ve skipped a stone and toss off a cigarette, relieved the lines in the face looking back aren’t ours just yet. There is only enough time to invent all these phrases that sustain themselves and contain mystery that arises the harder we squint for a clearer view of the lines of our face,

our faces are terrains of over explored expectations, the lines are the ravines where the certain futures fell,

hands,arms, legs tremble, ache, drag along the walk way, each step gets a caress from a shoe heel that could not be lifted high enough against the minor gravity.

SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET YELLED AT

Sister wants to fight while Dad prefers to drive and smoke his cigarettes alone in the car,

Brother tells sister to stop telling him what do do, it’s his tree and it’s his branch and he’ll jump if he feels like

And if gravity is kind, he'll have the good luck of not breaking his leg or snapping his neck.

Mom stares at the mixing bowl she filled with unwashed potatoes, thinking shit, all the ice has melted

Sister throws a rock at brother as he sits on the tree branch, swinging his legs back and forth.

The rock misses him and flies next door, crashing through the neighbor’s upstairs window. An old man comes to the window stares down at sister, who turns and runs into the house to find

Mom still considering the dirty potatoes in the mixing bowl.

Lighting his third cigarette with the push button lighter, Dad sings along with the advertising jingles on the radio and steers the car with one steady hand, the other one conducting a sudden outbreak of big band music from the speakers that is all but drowned out but a loud and frantic screech of tires.

Brother thinks about climbing down at last, thinking the dying of the light and the cry of sirens coming closer indicates that something’s amiss and someone is going to get yelled at.

THE REST WAS SILENCE

We were in San Francisco standing on a steep, sloping corner outside an Italian Ice store, smoking a joint in the cold , cutting wind. It was a beautiful night otherwise, because down the hill you could see the lights of the downtown buildings form a bright crescent around the bay. It was night and it was lovely but I was slightly drunk and shivering in my sport coat, and the joint made nervous as an assassin’s cat. The famous poet who’d come to see our reading at New College asked me what I thought of Gang of Four and Lydia Lunch. My stammering blended brilliantly with the gust of wind that swept over us just then. I muttered something finally about Johnny Winter and turned to look at the skyline and the expanse of the black bay and the boat lights that dotted the surface with bobbing bursts of yellow and red. Save for the gusting bluster, the rest was silence.

PAPER FLAG

A paper flag is in the window, stars and stripes bleached by hot and cold winds and all the sunshine California brags about even on afternoons where smoke crowds the horizon and air burns your lungs as you breathe, The stars and bars are now a faint, rusted green, a nauseated tint of yellow erodes the edges of each straight line, What was once white is a crinkled brow, a worried grey, the blue we knew is cracked and lined with spiderwebbing and the dry shells of dead insects,

The tape holding the paper to the window sill is likewise cracked, baked onto the glass paned, affixed as long as the window remains unshattered but long after the rage that made many scream one syllable slogans and cry at cat videos and cartoons of angry eagles clutching lightning bolts and missals in its talons has receded like beach sand coming and going with tides that occur whether we pay attention or not,

This day is pleasant, the workman are somewhere else with their tar and jackhammers, but this window still bears the paper flag staring at the traffic and diminishing pedestrian density as the sun recedes and the shadows get longer while whatever was on our mind as a species scrolls off the list of many things we’ll get to think all the way through.

I HATE POETRY

I hate poems about poetry but I do like poems with dirt under the fingernails,

that is,

verses that make less sense than a man and woman in the center lane of the expressway with all their furniture and A Sylvania tv that glowers with one big eye at passing traffic, yup, the news THEY DON’T REPORT when you need to hear it most. I like poems that are so full of crap that each stanza could fertilize acres of future corn, i have NO poems about poets or cats ,

no dog poems either but lets have more poems about baseball because BASEBALL is ALREADY a poem for the ages. Meanwhile, I remember your face coming out of the mist of the night parking lot and find myself grousing and grazing under lovely trees, after a walk, rubbing my knees.

WE CROSS AND UNCROSS OUR LEGS

We cross and uncross our legs
at the same time, light one cigarette
and then another, one for each hand,
check ourselves into rehabs and rental cars
that are out of control and useless to
a decent conversation,

it's just that we don't talk,

we just borrow each other's make up
and best stolen ad libs,

that is to say that stuff
is getting in the way of my stuff
and the more I try to describe
your best features , my image
vanishes in the bathroom mirror,

should i leave the seat up or down
and should you pull out a chair or a
gun and a bag of candy?

one of us will leave this relationship

and it won't be either of us, I will say that much.
otherwise , we should confine our remarks
to how we can stretch the meaning of words
and even rock solid ideas of reality as easily
as we can the waist band of a pair of stretch pants
one of us bought on the internet, stretch it until it breaks
and everything we created

 in 1st and 2nd person
drops to our ankles
 and neither of us
 gets anything from the other,

not even a middle finger.

Bruno Mars

To the matter as to whether Bruno Mars , who is not black, is appropriating black music and an aesthetic born of African American experience, created by talented black artists, well…I don’t know the man’s music, let alone his version of Black Style. I will him be and not mention him again in this harangue. Appropriation has been with us forever, although I would suggest that the non-black musicians playing music that is African American in origin have, for the most part, a genuine love of the sounds they've been exposed to. Theft is theft and black creators must be located, credited and their families paid for the use of the bodies of work that formed the foundation for a huge amount of American culture and a character, but at the same time it seems reductive and ironically bigoted to suggest that only black musicians have the right, let alone the sole ability to make authentic jazz, blues, or rhythm and blues. Forcing matters of creativity into a any kind of requirements for acceptance is absurd and contrary to what art is supposed to do, the process through which an individual--an artist--experiences the world and , through the use of whatever medium moves him enough to create objects of beauty of contemplation that hadn't existed before. Pretty much going with Marcuse on this one, as in his bookd the Aesthetic Dimension, where he argues that Society, The Establishment, the Powers that Be, need to leave the artists and allow them to perform their task with their art making, to produce joy. Otherwise, if held to aesthetic principles that are contrary to inspiration, it ceases to be art. It is Propaganda. We do not need an American version of Soviet Realism, no matter where it comes from. It goes to authenticity that one writes in a style that is natural to them; whites writing in idioms that makes sense for Mance Liscomb is clearly insulting to black musicians and black culture in general. It is a not so subtle form of racism: it says "I think you're exotic, not quite human, something wholly "other" than normal. I will take your funny sounds and use them to decorate my cosmology." Absent the absolutist argument that only black musicians have the right to play blues and are the only ones who can have anything authentic expression (it's a powerful argument), the bottom line of the blues is the clear, simple, emotionally honest expression of one's experiences. That would mean that one find their own voice, something they can bring of themselves to the music they desire to perform and make it genuinely personal. There is a difference, a fine one, between having a personal style greatly influenced by black music and singers and one that slavishly tries to impersonate the sound, causing all sorts of suspicious Rich Little-isms. Those influenced by black artists but who have their own style, free of affectation: Butterfield, Mose Allison, Van Morrison, Tom Waits. Those who fail: Jagger, when he sings blues, Peter Wolfe, others galore. Wolf is listenable and usually effective as vocalist and frontman, but he never convinced me that his style was cleverly constructed, contrived. I won't go as far as to say he's guilty of minstrelsy, but his banter where spews hip argot, rope-a-dope rhymes and other offerings of hep-cat impersonation, comes off as cartoonish, stagy, really stereotypical of black performance; whether Cab Calloway or James Brown or an inspired preacher sermonizing from the pulpit of a black church, Wolf's machine gun is appropriation straight out. I had often wished he'd just keep his mouth shut and just sing.Yes, I realize the irony of the last sentence, but I think you see my point even if you might not agree with it. J.Geils is a band I've enjoyed a great deal over the last few decades, but there are times when Wolf's unreconstructed enthusiasm turns into caricature and stereotype. He reminds me of someone trying to beat his influences at their own game rather than forging something that is really his own.