So Much Can Be Said Without Actually Saying Anything At All

--or--

Goddammit I Love My Job


Tonight at 315am a girl and guy walk in. She looks pretty young, and her face is broken out in what looks like acne. He's older. I figure she's his daughter. She asks,
-When's breakfast?

-I usually have it open at about five.

-Can you give me a ring when it's open?

-At five? Two hours from now? Are you sure?

She says,
-Honey, I just got off of work. This is my day. Five in the morning is good for me.

I realize that she's not his daughter.
-Yeah, sure, five it is.

On the counter is a case with candy in it, one of those charity deals, twenty-five cents for a tootsie-roll. She asks,
-If I put a dollar in here, can I get four tootsie-rolls?

-Yeah.

The guy asks,
-Hell of a price for a tootsie-roll, ain't it?

I say,
-It's for the kid.
I point to the picture of the girl on the front of the case.

-If it actually goes to the kid, sure.

-Where else would it go?

-The mafia does this sort of thing a lot.

-I think maybe you've seen My Blue Heaven one too many times.

-No, I know what I'm talking about.

I look at his girl.
-That's good. You probably also know that you just don't know what a person's last name is. If you know that, then you know that not every Italian comes from Sicily. And you would know that about an hour's drive north of Milan is a little village called Lecco. And everybody in Lecco has blonde hair and blue eyes. Quite a lot of the people north of the Po river are blonde. But then you knew that.

I smile at him.

They go back to their room. I go back to my office.

Jarhead Redux

I've been thinking about the movie a lot lately, and how war has moved from being ground-based to being air-based. I've been thinking about bombs lately. When I think, I write poetry. Thus, I wrote a poem. It's an ode.

big boom. big big
bad boom boom,
lovely and

orangey and lightful.
i know you exist, boom,
because i see you

exist, in film and film
and memories
of film, darkful and

orangey
yellow and red boom,
big and small boom,

my most and
least favorite cinema.

First, There Was

Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which was all about how basic training fucks people in the head, and they are never again right in the old topside, provided that they even survive basic to begin with. Then there was Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which was about how the things that are said and done in war can and will fuck somebody up for the rest of their preferably longlived lives. Now, there's Mendes' Jarhead. It's about how the things that somebody doesn't do during war will fuck him up forever and ever. It is the conclusion to the popular "War Is Fucked Up, Isn't It?" Trilogy.




Roger roger. So these guys are all training for a big war, for killing people and lots of people, preferably, but when the war does come, nobody gets to actually shoot at anybody because the airplanes do it all. Bombs, big bombs and more bombs and such as that. It all boils down to one scene, where the protagonists (Jake Gyllenhaal and Scott Macdonald? maybe) are sent on a mission and they set up, because they are snipers, to kill an Iraqi officer and they are all in position, and they get the go order and Jake is about to plug the guy, and then in storms a colonel and orders them to stand down, and calls in an airstrike instead. It is at this point that Jake and his buddy flip out and start begging and crying to be able to take the shot, just this one shot, but the colonel won't let them.

Wow. I know. That's what I thought too. Wow. Could there be a scene that resonates so completely with the everyman? A scene more capable of reaching its cold filmy hand into your chest and ripping out everything that you thought you knew, that you take for granted, your verily heartfelt heart of hearts?

Actually, there is. Maybe it's a scene that spans multiple scenes. A theme, even.

It's when Jake thinks his girl is cheating on him, because he's in Iraq and she's not, and some guy in his platoon's girl just sent this guy a videotape of her having sex with their neighbor and telling him to fuck off and everybody leaves the room wherein the tape is being played because it is, after all, this guy's wife, and Jake's buddy takes the tape out of the VCR and Jake says "Don't. I want to watch it. I want to know what it looks like when your girl's with somebody else." And then, some unspecified time later he's in the bathroom with a picture of his girl fiddling himself, but he just can't, and he starts hitting the wall because he can't.

Now that's what I call acting. Yep. It's a hell of a way to wrap up the trilogy too, coming full circle like that. Remember in Full Metal Jacket where that guy gets a psychiatric discharge because he's jacking off a dozen times a day, he even does it right there in the doctor's office, in front of everybody?

Full circle. Masturbation. It's what these movies are really about, and let nobody tell you otherwise.

Practical Principles Pertaining To Everything, Part Two

When you use a computer at work to post what-some-people-might-consider-to-be-offensive pictures to your blog, destroy the evidence. Preferably through the indiscriminate utilization of fire, which cleans AND cooks.

I'm Back

Maybe. I might be back. It's been a week. I'm sorry.

Looking on the bright side, I got a lot done during this week. It seems that the internet could be a big great big timekiller. Now I need to test the hyperthesis. Subject it to the old sciencifitic methodologia. Yeah. And then I can call it a theoryem, provided that it meets and/or exceeds all of the exceedingly difficult requirements that I provide it, excepting only the exceptions.

I learned that in physics.

I also learned in physics that nobody knows what gravity is. I thought that was stupid. I always thought that gravity was the stuff that held you to the earth. Like invisible gluey pandimensional flypaper or something. Apparently that sort of thinking gets laughed at by physicistas, even those of the schoolteacher variety. Apparently as well apparently nobody believes anything unless they know what sort of glue is on that old flypaper and whether it was made from my exgirlfriend's exhorse's teeths and hoofs, and whether the paper is onehundredpercent postconsumer recycled, with or without bleach?

I said,
-tell that to Newton.

Because he figured out that gravity was flypaper when an apple fell on his head.

The glue back in those postrenaissance preenlightenment days wasn't like the glue that we have today. Sometimes the glue didn't glue. And sometimes the glue glued, but then the glue came unglued like wallpaper glue used to do in hothot weather and sometimes the glue was just too damn superkrazygluey and apples and things like Yucatan meteors fell out of the sky.

We don't have to worry about Yucatan meteors anymore.
We have reverseglue these days.
We call them magnets, and when you turn a magnet around, it pushes things away.

I learned that in physics too.

Whenever somebody tells me that they wish that they lived back in the day because everything was so much less complicated, I tell them about the glue. A glue that only works right someofthetimes and otherofthetimes it attracts planetkilling meteors doesn't sound very uncomplicated to me. And then they shut the fuck up.

This Is A Quote

about Simone Muench's new book, Lampblack & Ash, from the Introduction to the book, written by Carol Muske-Dukes.

What Muench does in these poems is what, in fact, all poets purport to do—that is to say, talk to the dead

I was, after reading this, possessed of an epiphanous moment. I wrote a poem. I would like to share it.

poets don't
talk to dead people.
necromancers talk
to dead people.

burn the necromancers.
burn the witches. burn
saul. burn the false
prophets. if the

only books that are read
are in the new testament,
why include the
old testament at all?

burn the old testament.
remind kansas city
about the injunction
against false prophets.

burn kansas city.
the water is cold
this time of year.
burn the river styx.

Simone Muench's book may be purchased at Sarabande books.

The Question Has Been Settled

I have reached a decision. Those of you who haven't voted one way or the other yet might as well not vote at all. Super Tuesday has come and gone. You, my fair-weather friends, are late to the party. My parties always start promptly at 10. In the morning.

I have decided to go with gmail. Why? Because it was a unanimous agreement. A consensus, even. Unanimity and consensusnessicity must count for something, even in these dark days of rampant apostasy.

And Amanda Nazario pointed out that Holden Caulfield spells it without the 'n' anyway. If Holden Caulfield can do it, so can I.

Actually, I'll probably still use the hotmail account as well. I was reading 120 Days of Sodom yesterday and I got goosebumps and I said,
-Love, why the goosebumps? It couldn't possibly be because my window is broken and this cold windy shit keeps blowing on me and my neighbors are some loud fuckers so I have to keep the fan on to drown them out.

It's a big fan. One of those circular stainless-steel industrial-strength ones.

I realized that the goosebumps were from the realization that I am one of the lucky lucky few people in the world privileged enough to have not one free email account, but two. This realization was followed by my realizing the realization that in order to exercise such a privilege, the privilege must be exercised. So email away. To wherever.

An Exception To Practical Principle #1

Yes, there is an exception. It is the exception that proves the rule. Every poet should use this word in at least one of their poems. Preferably in every single poem they ever write. The word is:

cacodemonomania

Because it's better to show than to tell, I wrote a poem. It's an illustration of the poetic potential of this word.

tribble
tribble i
tribble tribble
tribble i you
tribble
cacodemonomania
tribble tribble
you

Here's A Question

for all my faithful readers out there.

As you may know, I currently have email through hotmail. Namely, goddamnbigcar_AT_hotmail_DOT_com

Just like you, I hate hotmail. So I tried signing up for gmail. Unfortunately, they apparently have some sort of profanity filter or something, so I couldn't get the user name that I wanted. I had to settle on goddambigcar_AT_gmail_DOT_com

So now what do I do? On the one hand, I really hate hotmail. On the other, I have to butcher that perfectly legitimate word in order to have gmail.

Decisions, decisions. What to do. What to do.

Quick, what's your vote? Which one should I use?

Do Not Read This At Work

Woody Loverude is how I found out about these.

Enjoy.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

It takes 14 puppeteers to make Vin Diesel smile, but only 2 to make him destroy an orphanage.


Chuck Norris's girlfriend once asked him how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. He then shouted, "HOW DARE YOU RHYME IN THE PRESENCE OF CHUCK NORRIS!" and ripped out her throat. Holding his girlfriend's bloody throat in his hand he bellowed, "Don't fuck with Chuck!" Two years and five months later he realized the irony of this statement and laughed so hard that anyone within a hundred mile radius of the blast went deaf.


23. That's the number of people Mr. T has pitied in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.

Practical Principles Pertaining To Everything, Part One

Never use a word containing more than three syllables in a poem. I ran across a four syllable word while reading Wallace Stevens:

majolica

What the fuck's a majolica? I'd look it up, but I'm a poet. Which means that I'm poor. Which means that the only dictionary that I can afford doesn't have that word in it. I'd look it up online, but free definitions are by definition the suck, and I'm better than that.

Here's another example of a greater-than-three-syllable word that nobody should ever ever use in a poem:

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

It reminds me too much of that song. From that movie. I'm sure you've heard it. What's it called again? Oh yeah, I remember.

"I'm Going Back To Cali"

These Are Lyrics From A Song I Wrote

called "Anarchy in Iowa."

I am an anarchist.
I am a counterchrist.

I didn't just take the lyrics from another song and change a prefix. Nope. That's not what I did. I wouldn't do something like that.

I'm thinking of naming the band "The Orgasm Guns."

Now taking applications for Guitar#1, Guitar#2, Bass Guitar, Drums, and Hammer Dulcimer. Rehearsals start tomorrow at noon. At the Y. Downtown.

Musical ability is not a prerequisite.

Wear your hair big.

I'm Putting Up A New Link

to Kristy Bowen's blog. Because she put up a link to mine. It's called reciprocation. That, and she's awful damn nice. She gave it to me for free.

A Friend Of Mine, Who Lives In Nebraska,

asked me the other day,
-Love, what are the women like over there in that great state of Iowa?

And I said to him,
-It's crazy, man, the women are all crazy. They run around naked all day long, and lay around in the sun or on the street or in their livingrooms with the shades wide open. It gets to be too much, sometimes.

He didn't believe me. He thought I was lying to him. As if a poet would lie about something like that. To be honest, I thought that his disbelief was a reflection of the state of our relationship. How can two men have any sort of honest intellectual/platonic discussion, when one of the two thinks the other one's an out-and-out liar? Somehow, I had to make him see what it is that I see. And then I had an idea. I thought, this being the age of Digital Technicolor and all, why not snap a couple of pictures? So I took my ever-so-versatile Nikon D200, and I went shopping.

Here's what I got:





























Isn't that amazing? Every time I think about it I am awestruck, as if I am seeing a naked woman for the very first time ever. And I get to deal with that every day. I'm thinking about moving somewhere where the women are a little more centered, a little more grounded in reality. Somewhere like California. Or Hawaii.

I Saw That Movie

over the weekend. You know the one.




That's right. DOOM: The Movie. Based on the video game. For some reason, I thought that the movie would be about people with guns. Killing aliens. Two of my favorite movies involve people with guns killing aliens: Starship Troopers and Aliens. Oh. Now that I'm reminded, I'd better update my profile.

No. That's not what the movie's about at all. It's about people with guns killing other people who neither have nor need guns to kill other people. Boy was I surprised.

Essentially, there's this research base on Mars and they discover some new chromosome that when injected (through a bite or a serum or whatever) into a person, turns that person into either a super-sub-human or a super-super-human, depending on that person's moral predilections. Imagine a sort of Hardee's-3/4-pound-of-Black-Angus-beefburger-sized Nietzschean concept of uber and untermensche.

The movie stars the Rock. And some other people. One of those other people is the protagonist. "The Hero," if you will. I'm sure you can already tell what the climactic scene involves, can't you?

After everybody is dead, there is only the Rock and the other guy. The Rock is evil. Being "The Hero," the other guy isn't. The Rock decides to go to Earth (the teleporter is located right outside of Los Angeles, or something), where he can engage in more wholesale slaughter. This, by the way, sounds like a fine plan to me. Call me a contrarian. The other guy decides to stop him, because he is "The Hero," and thus is not evil. They fight, in the way that only superpeople (or robots. See The Terminator series of movies for references) can fight.

I have heard some people say that they only liked the movie because the Rock gets his ass kicked. Contrast this to my own reaction at that pivotal scene, when I stood up and shouted,
-It's yours for the taking, Rock baby, all you gotta do is reach out your hand and grab it, there's nothing in your way now but one little do-gooder angelboy, Rock darling, you can do it. I believe in you. Next stop, Orange County California, boys and girls, teach those fascists a lesson in fear, yeah yeah, and then it's the world! THE WORLD!!!

While I do like attention, I don't like getting thrown out of movie theaters. What began as a simple "pacifistic resistance" to the usher's communistic desire to exile me to the furthest reaches of the parking lot gulag became an altercation reminiscent of any number of scenes involving seedy brothels and/or saloons, as documented by countless B-movies, when the usher decided to call in reinforcements.

I was high on life. I was like Keanu Reeves or Patrick Swayze in Point Break. I knew no fear. I was proud of the stand I was taking against the movie theater's suppressing my first amendment rights. I felt like Patrick Henry. I felt big, bigger than big, bigger than life. I felt like the Rock. And like the Rock, I suffered an excruciating beat-down. I blame it on the flashlights. Ushers carry some godawful big and terrifying flashlights.

No longer content with just inhibiting my moviegoing experience, the Movie Theater Monopoly decided to hand me over to the authorities. I spent the rest of the night in the clink, for disturbing the peace or some shit. I know what you're thinking right now, that it's not fair, that I was just trying to exercise my right to peacably assemble a scenario of global conquest, but as I learned that night, the world's not a fair place. In fact, it's positively hostile.

Has Anybody Else Noticed

that when you play Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" backwards (from the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt), you can hear the soprano sing "this is what it sounds like when doves cry?"

Because I Am On A Haiku Kick

I will share with you something that I found. I call it Jim Morrison Haiku.

You wanna ride the worm?
You wanna ride the worm?
Okay, I let you ride the worm.

I did not write this haiku. Neither will I share with you who it was that did write it. That would be cheating.

Be prepared.
The future is now.
You are the next lucky contestant!

The first person to correctly guess where I pulled the Jim Morrison Haiku from gets a prize. What is the prize? You get to lick the tootsie-roll pop that I couldn't finish because my tummy hurt.

Satan Is Dead! Satan Is Dead!

That's what Wallace Stevens said,

The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
And, with him, many blue phenomena.

and everybody knows that when a poet says something, you better damn well pay attention.

Time for a pop quiz.

1) Who is dead?
2) Was this death an instance of comedy?
3) What killed him?
4) Where was he killed?
5) Who was he killed with?

This episode of the "Esthetique du Mal" has been brought to you by the letter "VIII".

Haiku Haiku

can be said to be an exploration of the transcendental as discovered in everyday situations. Thus, this is a Haiku Haiku that I wrote. Enjoy.

In my quest for the
other, I encounter my-
self. On the toilet.

This Haiku Haiku has been made possible by the contributions of our contributors.

Guinness: Irish good-times in a bottle. Or a can. Sometimes a glass. Brilliant!

Jameson: Triple-distilled and Irish. A fracas begging to be imbibed.

Beefeater: The drink that satisfies the most contrary English temperament. The first choice of Juniper Berry Imperialists everywhere.

Speaking Of Haiku

I found this in a comment box on somebody else's blog. I call it Spam Haiku.

I am totally nude come see me.
Why do I do this I like to make men
blow their jiz in their pants. Visit me.

Because it's not good to contribute to the delinquency of poets, I have exercised my rights as editor, and removed the link to the naughtynaughty page.

Haiku Is The New Black

There is no poetry form more descriptive of our age. Everybody knows what haiku is. Everybody loves haiku. Everybody can type a haiku into their cell phone and text it all over everywhere. It is short. It is random. It is awesome. Haiku is the new Christianity. Haiku is the new Islam.

Kaitlin Harrington wrote a haiku. I would like to dedicate it to me. She gave it a title. Because I am the editor of this page, I removed the title. Haiku don't have titles. Being the editor, I can do that. This is representative of a new genre of haiku that I call Weezer Haiku.

I lost a button this morning.
Suddenly, I find myself
Exposed.

She read this to a haiku purist. He said, That isn't haiku. Haiku has to be 5-7-5 and be all season/nature imagistic and shit. I said, Take your Imperialist Elitism and go somewhere else. We don't want any. We're only dancing. From the hip.

I wrote a haiku. I would like to dedicate it to Kaitlin Harrington. It doesn't have a title. Haiku don't have titles. It is also Weezer Haiku.

How'd you get a gig with Hugh?
I would like to be with Hugh.
Heffner, in Beverly Hills.

This space has been reserved. It is for the purpose of reminding my readers that right now, at this very moment, there is a HelloKitty CyberBunny in Tokyo saying, Take your Imperialist Elitist Haiku Purist Nature shit and go somewhere else. Except that she is saying it in Japanese.

Do You Remember

when I told you about that time that I was in my bedroom and then I blacked out and then I woke up in a circular room, spinning, around and around spinning, and there were all these candles and things all over and somebody had obviously spent a hell of a long time lighting all the candles and I wasn't creeped out really because the room was white? Yeah, what I didn't tell you was that I had just attempted to read something not unlike this:

The subject of narrative form-building and it’s role in creative music is a complex subject that establishes at least four areas of ‘subject-focus’ that can be isolated for discussion, that being: 1) that the base nuclear logic that defines cognition is a tri-centric thought unit that cannot be properly transmitted ( or understood) without some inclusion of a ‘corresponding- poetic’ logic (association/binder) that respects the experiences of the ‘living person’ (the actual ‘experien-cier’). 2) that narrative form building is directly related to the form of evolution that produced the ‘modern-era’ and should not be discarded, 3) that the challenge of the next time cycle transcends two-diminsional modeling constructs and instead calls for a fresh unit of perception that recognizes target ‘sub-level experiences’ ( that included intention, and ‘vibrational-spectra’).¹

This quote, if you're hellbent on experiencing the circular white candleroom for yourself, is from Ron Silliman's 11/10 post.

As I think about that incident now, I probably should have been freaked out when I woke up. Whoever painted that room white was crafty. Crafty and clever enough to lull me into a false sense of security, anyway. I can well imagine my initial reaction had the color of the room been, say, black. Or red. Or red AND black. Or even white with a bunch of red speckles.

I'm Introduced To This Guy

and he told me his name is Dusty Crazybull. I said,
- That's Native American, right?

He nodded.

- What tribe?

- Lakota Sioux

- Oh yeah, I replied, That's awesome. I just watched that movie, the one that has Val Kilmer in it, Thunderheart, yeah that's it, for like the dozenth time, and you guys are awesome. Love what you're doing. Have you ever had a vision? I'd like to have a vision. Can you teach me to have a vision? You're all down with the earth and stuff. Love it. The earth, I mean. And you guys being all Guardians of the Gates, you know? Damn I want a vision. But I'm trapped. I'm trapped, I tell you, trapped in this city, and I just feel like I'm suffocating sometimes and I need to get away and get down with our great mother goddess great spirit, you know? And then maybe I'd have a vision too. Like you've probably had lots of visions, being out there, being one with the earth and all. Damn. I wish I was Lakota Sioux. Hell, I'd settle for being one of those uranium miners who are trying to rape mother nature with their cyanides and toxic wastes and who at the end are all trapped and surrounded by some pissed-off Lakota and about to get their asses righteously dealt to them, just so I could be a part of it, man, just so that I could say I was there, that I was this close, that I actually felt the earth breathe and move and shout. Yeah, I'd settle for that.

And then Dusty Crazybull walked away.

I liked him.

I've Gotta Tell Ya

Whenever I think of that acronym MOAB, which is short for Massive Ordinance Air Burst, aka Mother Of All Bombs, I think about how Lot's daughter got him good 'n drunk and fucked him six ways for seven days, excluding the sabbath.

On Monday I Took The Vehicle

to my mechanic because whenever I shifted into high gear, and the revs dropped, there was this "whoosh" noise and then a "whump" noise. This was the same sequence of sounds that occurred right before the last time I burst into flames.

The mechanic looked at it and told me it was the turbochargers.

I said,
- That's the third time in five months.

He took me into the garage and pointed somewhere under the hood. I don't know where. Somewhere in the middle, I think.
- Look at these mudveins right here, you see these veins? Whoever fixed yer chargers last time had his head in his ass. Goddamn foreign shit.

I paid and I left, but not before smiling at Julie the Receptionist.

He's been my mechanic for the last six years.
She's been his receptionist for the last six years.

Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

I say bathroom,
you say washroom.

I say drinking fountain,
you say bubbler.

I say french fry,
you say chips.

I say, Where the hell
did you grow up that you
learned to say words like that?

You say, A strange foreign land
called Someplace Else.

I Had A Friend Once.

And then he raped a dead kitten with a pencil.

The Truth Is Out There.

You can find it right here.

Here's To You, Joe Hodge

baby, light of my poetic fire, I just can't say what your verse does to me, you smooth criminal:

Seriously.
This is a poem.


Wait, yes I can. And I will. I read it and I say,
- No it is not, Joe Hodge you are so full of shit.

And then I read it again and I say,
- Okay you might be right, Joe, it just might be a poem.

And then I'm confused and I realize that I might as well be smoking crack for all the benefit a close reading gives. And the Lord in His wisdom knows I do like my crack.

ps - I have taken to passing this one off as my own and writing it on the stalls in the Ladies Room, right above my phone number, in the hope that some of the good women out there will be impressed enough to consent.

pps - To have sex.

ppps - With me.

The Truth Comes Out...

You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the
postmodernists, you collect avant-garde
Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal
articles for breakfast. You positively live
for theory. It really doesn't matter what
kind, as long as the words are big and the
paragraph breaks few and far between.


What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla


Nevermind that not five minutes before I took this quiz I was over at Cosmopoetica ranting about how Poetic / Literary Theory blows hard assmonkeys. Go figure.

Truth be told, if I could spend just half-an-hour inside that particular theory slut's body, I would die happy.

Riots In France!

I was talking to my friend and she said,
- There's riots in France tonight, darling.

And I said,
- I'm always up for a good riot. Let's go.

- To France? It's awfully far away and not exactly as if we can walk and airplane tickets are so dreadfully expensive these days.

- That's easy, I said. We can use our imagination.

- Oh what a fabulous idea, Kermie sweet'ums, yes let's.

She and I then had a grand gay old time torching Renaults and Le Cars, although I must say that I became famously disillusioned with the entire episode after about an hour. It wasn't nearly the riot that I imagined it would be.

Now You've Done It. I'm Pissed.

Ron Silliman has yet another post here (see the Nov. 3rd entry) where he tries to trace the poetic genealogies of everybody. Not a problem. We love you, Ron. Good stuff. The problem comes in the comments to the post. Kirby Olson says, "How many poems could stand up in the marketplace?" and, "Bukowski I think could hold his own, as could the other top two Beat poets."

Way to go, Kirby!! We're cheering for you here, baby.

But then Curtis Faville comes back with a zinger. Watch out, Kirby!

He says, "Kirby, why are you always trying to seek the lowest common denominator? So-called notions of "popular" poetry rarely pass muster. "Popular" ballads and ditties and rags have always been around--but that doesn't mean we compare them to Dante and Goethe and Shakespeare, does it?" Ouch. That hurts (in an aside here, I thought that Shakespeare WAS a writer of those "popular rags" back in the day, and wasn't immediately accepted by the literary establishment). And again, "How can you compare Bukowski to Browning, or Tennyson, or Frost--each of whom was extraordinarily popular in their time." A person could think that this would be enough. Surely Kirby has hit the mat now. Will he get up? Is he down for the count? WAIT A MINUTE!! Curtis Faville hits Kirby while Kirby's trying to recover!! Ladies and Gentlemen, this is outrageous! This is absurd!! This is like watching my grandmum undressing in the men's locker room because she's blind and can't read the signs any more and hasn't the foggiest idea of anything and I just can't stop looking!!! "Yours sounds like an argument AGAINST quality, in favor of some populist doggerel. You can't be serious."

Come on Kirby, get up. Get up, Kirby. Lay him out. Use your superMikeTysonUppercutLeft to his nose, baby, come on, I got a fifty riding on this, To the Moon baby, To The MOON!

Kirby: "I myself would rather have Moore or Stevens than Bukowski, for certain"

Bah. I should have known better than to bet on a guy named after a videogame.

Populist doggerel. Pfah. You know, whether or not people refuse to see it, there's a certain wisdom that belongs to the masses. And when a guy like Bukowski can arguably be called the most popular poet of the post-war twentieth century, maybe he's onto something. Myself, I think I'd take Thomas Jefferson over King George any day of the week.

Now look. You've made me take a stand on something. There goes any career I might have had in politics. Goddamn you, Curtis Faville.

ps - After everything's finished and the fat lady sings and the cows come tripping home after a night painting the pasture, David Bowie said it best: "John, I'm only dancing. She turns me on. Don't get me wrong. I'm only dancing."

In Other News

This is a picture of my ass:











This is a picture of my girlfriend's ass:




Isn't the resemblance remarkable?

I'm Putting Up My First PermaLink

It should be on the right side of your screen, and it should be to Ron Silliman's blog. I'm not doing it because I agree with everything he says or anything like that, because I don't. I think he's full of shit most of the time. But what he does say makes me think. And as anybody who's ever been to college knows, thinking destroys the soul.

So I'm Flipping Through The Guest Registry

at the hotel that I was walking through last night, quickquick before the frontdeskguy comes back from wherever he's at, and this other guy comes in and says, I've got a reservation for Fischbach. I can tell the guy's got problems because of the way he says his name and so I tell him, You're not welcome here because the last time you were here I had complaints from everybody on the fourteenth floor who heard the fish screaming, and it took me five weeks to clean that fishscream smell from room oneohfour and I don't want to have to do that again, you cost us a lot of business you Polish fish fucker. I hate Polish fish fuckers always bringing in those Polish fish from all over the city, what do you do, drive around to all the fishmongers just looking for Polish fish? Pervert. I don't want you here. Go away. It's disgusting hearing those fucking perverted fish fucking noises in Polish. I always thought that everybody in the world orgasmed in the same language, oh oh oh, but no not you and your sick Polish shit fucking fish, you can get a disease doing that. You gotta leave because I'm sick of Polish fish I can't ever get the smell to come off, it's kinda like wetdogsmell in Canadian acidrain, it took five weeks last time just to clean that funky Polish fish fungus outta the bathtub, so if you want to stay, you gotta make it worth my while. You gotta speak the green language, man, if you know what I mean.

He knew what I meant.

I took the money and went to the Lumberyard, where real men go to get wood, and I bought twenty minutes with a nice Catholic girl named Maria. And then I bought a tootsie-roll pop but lost count of the licks about halfway through.

Crack Whore

As it turns out, I do actually like a line or two from the two Lindsay Stone chapbooks that I happen to own (Shrooms Are Illegal and Non-stop Flight from Mars to Venus). So, you want to know what they are? Of course you do. Good. They are both from the poem "Crack Whore."
The first is:

She is the Crack Whore.

Goddamn that line's fine. I like the way it says that she's not just any old crack whore, oh no. She's THE crack whore. Beautiful stuff.

And the second is (two lines, actually):

GOD FORGIVE ME,
FOR I HAVE FUCKED SATAN...

I feel the same way, Lindsay, I feel the same way. And now I'm inspired. Tomorrow, when I'm touching myself and thinking about the Lord of Ruddiness himself, I might write a poem about it.

What else can I say about the chapbooks? They sure do have some pretty pictures. Especially the naked ones.

Alright, Alright, Alright, Michael Jackson Never Actually Used The Bathroom In My House

But his sister did...

OMFG!!1! The Sky is Falling!

Just call us all Chicken Little.

Lately I've been reading Robert Archambeau's blog. Good stuff. Particularly the discussion on Kellogg's coordinate model of poetics, which is a simple x and y-axis grid, like we all learned to hate in algebra. But I got to thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought, does poetry really need another attempt at categorization? Of course not. What DOES need a coordinate system of classification, however, is the end of the world. That's right, I'm talking about the apocalypse, baby.


What am I talking about? I'll tell you what I'm talking about. Take that x and y-axis. On the x-axis (that's the horizontal, for those of you still traumatized by and repressing memories of high-school), in the negative, you've got the liberals who think that the world's going to end because Bush won't sign Kyoto, and because Americans are a bunch of Imperialistic assholes who deserve whatever they get, which they are gonna get, because that's what happens to assholes and Imperialists, just look at Rome and Colonial Britain. Besides which, the Bush crowd are a bunch of fascist warmongers, and fascist warmongers eventually get taken down a notch (See World War II for details). Note that I chose the negatives for the liberals because the negatives just so happen to correspond with the left side, and why break with tradition? And then in the positives, you've got those who think that the watermelons, or rather, those people that are green on the outside but red on the inside, are the root cause of western society's ills. And the watermelons (also known as communists, for those people who still haven't understood the reference) are just aching to take away everybody's freedoms and guns, and let all the immigrants in to take away their jobs too. And that'll doom America. And as America goes, so goes the world, because we're that important. So it'll be the end of the world.

I call the x-axis the political axis.

Then we have the y-axis. Positive numbers on top, of course. Here, in the positive, we've got those spiritual sorts of people who think that the world's going to end through supernatural means. Either God's pissed off at all the degenerates running around (see, for examples, the explosive growth in the porn industry, and the murder of all the innocent babies through abortion, and the rising rape rate, etc.) or aliens or critters from another dimension are going to evolve everybody into the next-higher plane of existence. And the negative numbers are those who think that it won't be supernatural, but natural, because everybody can see that the global climate's changing and the icecaps are melting and goddammit we're all gonna drown! Or if we don't drown, the planet'll get so hot that life won't be capable of being sustained. Or the sea current'll change direction and we'll have another ice age, and then won't we be in a pickle? Not to mention the magnetic field which keeps wobbling and threatening to reverse polarity, which might be cool if one morning we all woke up and the toilets flushed the other direction and compasses pointed south, but all the killer earthquakes which will kill everybody first certainly might put a damper on that, and aren't we about a hundred thousand years overdue for it right now? Don't forget those supervolcanos, like the one in Yellowstone, that if it goes off will bury everybody in the continental United States under two-dozen feet of ash. Aren't we overdue for that one as well? Or a planet-killing meteor. Like the one that made the Yucatan, only bigger.

I call the y-axis the metanatural axis.

Hey, for those people in the middle, I haven't forgotten about you. I know it's awfully fashionable to call yourself a moderate these days. So the middle, the 0,0 point, that's where sit all the people that don't know what the hell's happening, all they know is that some bad shit's coming. And really, don't we all? I read somewhere about Teddy Kennedy saying much the same thing, how he's glad he's as old as he is because it's all going to fall apart and he doesn't want to be around to see it. Christ I wish I could remember where I read that. Oh well. Hearsay, hearsay, horsemouth says as horsemouth does.

Between the political and metanatural aspects of the end of all times, or at least this time, which the Mayans say will happen on December something 2012, I think we have all of the bases covered. If I missed something, let me know. I'd hate to say that I hurt somebody's feelings by leaving them out.

And for everybody (and I really do mean everybody. All the wonderful and great and not so great people alive today) who ever gets those shivers up their spines, here's one to remember:

"I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames." -Jim Morrison

ps - Who better to look to for guidance, who better to emulate and teach our children (provided we have any children or provided our children grow old enough) to emulate, than James "I am the Lizard King, I can do anything" Douglas "I'll always be a wordman, better than a birdman" Morrison?

pps - I stole the picture. It's not mine. Anybody who bothered to actually follow the link I posted would know that.

Use The News

For all you free internet porn perverts out there, there is a better way. But then, if you've been doing the free thing for awhile, you probably already know this. So there's viruses and shit and worms and trojans and popup spam! that plagues every promiscuous pervert on the net just surfing around, trying to hook himself up. But there is a better way, my brethren! Use the newsgroups, man, use the news. The news is your friend.

Except when you accidentally download some pictures of Russian twelve-year olds. What is it with Russians and the child porn? Seriously. First there's Nabokov. Well, he probably wasn't the first. After all, it's been said that there's a reason why all those naked Greek statues have faces like little boys, and are hung like little boys (of course, it's also been said that maybe those ancient Greeks were just small. But I don't think that anybody seriously believes that). But Nabokov may be the most important figure in the contemporary sense. He did coin the word Lolita (or maybe he just popularized it. I don't know). You don't see too many sites saying things like, "Get your Tadzios here! Free Naked Tadzios!!! Tadzio on Tadzio, good stuff!! Or, My very own Tadzio brother fucks my mom in the ass, and she likes it, because you can see her smile a lot in the pictures that are way too polished to actually be of my brother and mom." Tadzio being, for those of you not in the know, the young young Polish boyobject of Gustave Aschenbach's obsession in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." And Mann was German, and those Ancient Greeks were Greek, so maybe Russians don't have a proprietary license on childporn. Or maybe they do, but it's not an historic license, and it all started with Nabokov. Damn that Nabokov and his single-handed demolition of everything pure in Russian culture! Or maybe it's a global industry catering exclusively to middle-aged white Americans, because that's where all the money's at. Damn those Americans and their childporn imperialism! And their capitalist vices!

Robert Creeley Robert Creeley Robert Creeley

in one of the best poems ever. That's right, ever. EVER!!


I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, --John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.