IMMEDIATELY POEMS (Rilke & Kandinsky)
Cream Puff Epicenter
They look so cool in they
Look so cool blue heads and pearls
Babies in the U
All-New Neurosis
You can imagine the opposite
A skinbare sleeping bag in the foyer
The glacial steam begatting time
Eyeball to eyeball
The opposite being not
The opposite containing
The thing itself
The glacier slowly melting
Into treacherous technicolor life
Palace Alley
Big green trees light the way
Neath four shooting stars
Tears of the moon ripple sea
A frame of wood and beauty
The Other Way
Locomotive churgs out the century
Electric lights pop speed
But shadows are people
Never get out of the car
Never wear the same clothes
The other way from the sun
The Third Phase
In a basement somewhere
Manger turns over baba
Little childe spills the future
First the waterfall becomes the salad
Then the frame becomes the thing
Now the bundled nerve
Oh her horses race the future
Head on past the past by a nose
Sun shot out of a cannon rock
Driving mouth union
Lifting gently over
Her dress trims the green
Pure Expression
A black blob way up there
Flies so sweetly by
Let's drop the strings of all pretense
And fly into the black blob
Sacrifice
My mother gave birth
To me so I could take
Off my head and hand it to you
One Clown to Another
Around the ring it's fun
A freshly furnished garden
Harmless germoids watch 'em tango dance
You call that a secret?
One Red Eye
Blink a room of bad paintings
Turn a circle out of prison
Air raid! Fata Morgana! Winter!
No escape, a little flame everywhere
In Munich Pool Hall
Beer is normal
Toothpicks are brought
Blue cabbage
Spilling water smoke
Layers are all liars,
To sweet onion heart
Becoming the Other
"Everyone loves you when you're someone else."
- Robert Stone
From here from there
The door knocks the air
A patient rises above
The placid table, looks
Below - far below - beneath
The floor to see the sea
The cemetery see
Which is me
And then how over but
All's the same as not
A moment too soon stops
The wild flutter and motors
The censor to approbation
Kicking and screaming as the
Wave breaks on your fear
K. und Munte am Tisch
I was hatched without this much troubling coffee
So you paint, want to paint me?
Here my garters don't show said Wassily
To the teacup set just so
Iris at the Kopf
(What Actually Happened)
I put on
My bone glove
Androgynous dream
Crept over my body
Bone glove groped
The lips and pulled them out
Froze me with your kissing
Someone Jumps
Off the horse over the fence
Begins a few poems
Back over the fence onto the horse
Impression
Impression is what came before, now
Here we go standing by where they were
They now ghost in a view you see
We squint at same red sun
Black outline holds my hand
Total Heart
Improv Japanese science
Zip patches quietly
Content in sheer verb
I'll call my whole life "study"
Venus Awakes
No light
All touch
Funny lines
All tats
Rhythms, Strong and Free
No shortcut to beauty
First the desire then that
Which fills the desire
A grey spring day in Munich
A grey spring day in Munich
Dachau
This sadness no bird
Would sing
Grim, gray ground
Stone mud crematorium
Gas chamber
Words spell nowhere else
Concentration
Every stone
Every bedding
Every breath
Every oven
Every thought
Every one forever
After Rilke
O Rose, o pure contradiction
Enjoy being in no one's sleep
Under so much ice
Barbarous Boring Bullshit
A cuppa jav, a coupla eyes
Dum de dum
The swinging door
Just don't swing
The way it usta
In Glockamorra
Death
The Lovers (Rilke)
See how the lovers come into being.
Spirit flowing in their arteries
Their bodies tremble like axels
A circle of magnetic heat surrounds them.
Thirst, and they become the drink
Wake up and see... they become seeing
Let them sink into each other.
So that they can overcome
Die Liebenden
Sieh, wie sie zu einander eiwachsen,
in ihren Anders wird alles Geist.
Ihre Gestalten beben wie Achsen.
Um die es heiss und hinreissend Kreist
Durstende, und sie bekommen zu trinken
Wache und sieh: sie bekommen zu sehn
Lass sie in einander sinken,
Um einander zu uberstehn.
Rilke
My Only Regret
That we didn't do Death
That we didn't do breath
Nor use the word nor
Nevertheless it was fun
Chewing gum
Am Sternberger See
Someone looks at the lake
Someone is on the lake
Someone is in the lake
The lake is slowing the someone
The lake is seeing
The lake is taking care of itself
Frankfurt Wheels On
Across the Main
Forsythia blooms ahead
Of spring sudden blue
Remembers tiny iris
Glistening with dew
Beside the skyscraper
Puberty Neurosis
O gimme gimme gimme
Gimme do gimme do gimme gimme do
Or else or else or else else else
I wanna wanna wanna
Wanna wanna wanna
You're a creep I just thought you would like to know
Ripping eight years
From your life
Where do they go
Yellow suns on young boy
Tossed into the river
It's a beautiful view
Too bad you cannot see
Small Flowers of Solitude Zone
Mundsburgebrucke
I am falling
Deep
Into the Ausenalster
There is no canal
That leads here
You can barely hear
The daffodil creeping up
Through sweet spring
Nature naturally sweeps
The breeze into your lungs
So many of you
Calmly wearing skin inside
A Pendulum for Life
Free sun orbit!
Keep mind proceeding somehow out eyes
No sleeping sleeping
A candle burns through a body
The clicking of insects on a blue glass window
Little Wheels in Africa
The woman is shouting
Her mouth to my eye
I was on top
Of the mountain
Mow the mountain
Late Night Bully
One star wept
It was all all right staring
It was a simpler vocabulary
Made simply of stone
God Appears in Human Form
Put the fish
In the air!
And the mammal
And the mammal underground!
On the Way (To Nowhere)
(Not Having Fun)
While being led
Over the ungrafittied parts
Of the crumbling wall
I bled a kiss
Someone Else's Haircut
In case you were still wondering
Wake up! Escaped birthdays
Have built little pockets where
The trains go, where the sweet
Snow trails the morning
And I don't know doesn't work
Reflecting upon the face in the soup bowl
Most tenderly regret rien
Ice Blitz
Because you stand alone
In the middle of the room
Trying to balance the world
Life's pendulum shouts escape
As the door opens
To let you back in again
Square Angel
Wings fall squarely
Over the statue's face
Not a shame
Just an airconditioner
Walking Modern
Steps of angels hidden
Psychopathic remnants of a fool
There was a moment for the true pigeon
All I can say is nothing
And a yellow hat
To tip the sea
From my clanging stupidity
Kneeling By My Own Coffin
A black blob lifts from the ground
I am amazed at how sweet I
Lie with a sense of casual relief
Beckoning the Walrus
Sit in your big silent chair
Pick stuffing from the rip
Without threading the connections
Idly grasping mustache
Fish on Trapeze
Swimming on the mirror is forbidden
No swimming on the mirror!
A cough ends the millennium
Just like that pendulum
Back through the open door again
cloud
village on the
tree horizon
horse
chaussee
de plomb
Red Cross
A circle
Horizon
Light blinks
To stay on
Horse Without a Title
Bird without a song
Dog without a chase
Roll boxcars boxcars roll
Cave of Love
How often I hide in
the cave of love
You on the bed your hand
dangling
Fingers deliriously glance
the rug
My skin contorts into
shape
Your sweet love and the infinite
space
When the happiness laps upon
your beautiful truth
And I am lost in this poem
writing this poem
No One Holds A Candle
The light itself creates
The waxy surface of the morning wash
A work of light lifts gently
The metaphor to reveal
The clouds unveiling oopla
The sky humming
Itself into being
I Can't Remember
When I told you that
Poem it was like a
Dream within a dream:
You were talking I was
The words were coming
Out I was waking up
Over and over and out
Ich War Da
Messer im kopf
Kopf am tisch
Tisch ist weld
Wan Kommen Sie?
Besonders warum -
Parken verboten
Uber alles
Everything Without Thinking
Played Star Club (Hamburg) last night
Waterski Steernberger See one foot
What's the matter with me? Nothing
A good suicide won't cure
G'night, sweet discontinued currency
I've given the key
To the cat who lies awake
Breathing the ocean
Back to life
Once Upon A Life
As sweet Death began its lullabye
I was granted as many wishes as I wanted
But it was only my life my life
Passing for my eyes
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IN HONOR OF TITO PUENTE'S 100TH RECORD ALBUM
Ai,
I just take a muscle
waxerRelaxer
When your record arrives in all three
formatsRatscats
Tito Tito Tito
TiTo
Bailar! Crispy claves eke
bonesBones
Right through my feet -- I'm
bonedBoned
Chango, amigo, my anti-perspirant's
failedNailed
I'm a sack of flesh
lostTossed
Where the salsa grabs the mambo's
ass'sAss
Tickle the air synCOpate
gyreGyration
Kissing fire 100 times hundred
timesTime
Just dancing round rounder
rounDest
Musica musica
muSica
Tito Tito
TiTo
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JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT “THE MELTING POINT OF ICE”
Hear the art of words
The samo samo - copyrighted
Writ up and down and over so the at the
Crossed-out might read
Jean Michel Basquiat - a cause of celebre
To celebrate
Not shutting up/ shooting up art straight
Scratched wiggly def
Nerves
What better connection than the word word
With the meaning on the side
Than the rap rap
With your ears as a guide
Between the Whitney Museum of Americab Art
and the Nuyorican Poets cafe
All the world lies down in a grid
Jean Michel Basquiat home here on 3rd between B and C
His paintings verb the walls at 75th and Mad
HIT IT HITMAN
M G E
E N P
L I O C
T I
N I
T F
O
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LOU READS BOB FROM A MUSIC STAND
Tangled up in blue cord
holding glasses on
pride boots
it's all right from inside
from tangled
midnight battle call collect
knock knock knock
who's there there there
'sgot nothing to live up to
Every mega needs a sore doo da doo
the cops don't need you
and man they expect the same
_________________________________________________
I love poems
_________________________________________________
I'm the hotseat
Where the asshole
Kisses the fart
I am running hysterical naked
My dick up my asshole
Ringing broken intercondoms
Searching for the Future
Which is patiently being
Revealed in my footsteps
O little tears
How I am saddened
By your departure
From the maps of my face
O dear poets
How I love you
Your words
All manifestations
Of love
Of love
_________________________________________________
There's No Big Message except hope you've had a good time while reading this
While somewhere the Great Novel is being shredded
I must stand up and say my piece
Or at least a piece of my piece "Shredded Piece"
I will never sit in that class again, a stone
Eating away at the heart of existence
Plenty of homeless people want to read my poems
They are lucky I stand at the newsstand
Cursing the politicians and making faces
Maybe all I'm saying is it's a real job
Being unemployed
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(or, Why You Just Gots to Gots to Vote This November)
"I'm the Mother of the Motherless Child"
As the little laugh screeches to the side of the highway and throws up
A baseball with a siren on careens up beside demanding map of Li'l Laugh's DNA
And announces that all occupants must immediately prioritize
The needs of children with AIDS vs. homeless families
Artists of all varieties are put to work collating these scraps of empowerment
Creating an all-new art, politically-streamlined, called the No Exit Poll
But you you you
You are in a secret passage leading to your lover's womb
When a little relay flips you in weightless ecstasy
Towards the moment where you are born complete with sleeping bag coat
The quilt it took your grandmother ten years to make lies folded over the horsehair dumpster
A blue sun pops out like a blimp over New Jersey
The planets, once the reconnoitering of Jesus is declared completed by high council of Arabs and Jews,
These planets whose names spell I love you backwards on your death bed,
These self-same planets that have thus far in two seconds ultimately
Defined your bopping astrological bar code lifetime existence existence
Recombine into tHE aLL-nEW Gondwanaland of aLL-rITE dEELITE
Lean spinning into the new ear of poetry liquid language fibrillating universal cilia
Sure we're one big dysfunctional cosmo family
But that doesn't mean you can't get one of the major parties
To give you a lift to the voting booth
On this Election Day 1996
When it's so important that you vote for an all-identical monster ticket
To continue to sweetly crap the earth
With a mock kiss and a million billion ands or elses
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PUBLIC SERVICE COMMERCIAL FOR CHANNEL 31, WNYC-TV
Time to zip the zap
With a poetry rap
Been searching for Emancipation from the everpresent commercialization?
Filled with Indignation over the Eternal Recapitulation?
Starting to have Interior Refrigeration?
Halleluelation!
We're Channel Thirty-one.
Your hired gun.
You thought that you would ever see
A poetry video on your tv
When what comes glidin cross the tv screen
You see words are just words until they Mean
Poetry spots your eyes
Surprise -
But if you want it all
Better give us a call
You get a say
you get to pay
Support us
Or abort us
Time to zip the zap
With a poetry rap
Thirty-one
Yr hired gun
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In order to save the relationship
We will never see each other again
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So they tell me get your act together
Write something make it new for a change
Give up on those arrant habits
Go to Chicago
Be there for Birth of Slam
Knock down a few bowling pin icons
Bowling allies, new stain t-shirts
Statues of lint and a make-my-day jock strap
I'll sit in with Scott King and the Rib Tips
Watch true brews slide down a mahogany bar
Run it by my man Sergio over at Weeds as we
Wait for the Queen of Poetry to drive in from el Boss Town
So hoist the performing poems by their own retards
Keep the meddlesome wordslingers cranky
Invent a new alley, grab the moon
Climb on top of the speaker system and fly
Write a book and get it out
Invent the pseudonym to review it, rave
Rave rave along the Lake
Rehearse the verse all ears radar Michigan
And fall in love a few times so nobody knows about it
Keep it to myself a few poems quit, quite, and quiet
Outside of so-called competition and the waving blades
Making slow smoky patterns at the old Green Mill
_________________________________________________
TALKING WITH A COMET ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR
Comet blazing overhead, I blink,
Like turn-of-the-century photographer
Slam the plate home. Chemical
Smell, flash powder: off to the side,
Bulb plungered, explosion etches, stretches
Clear to the heavens, here comes Comet
Sliding on down. Ain't no cartoon moonish. No
Belushi. Comet big green cunt prick, switcheroo
Bisex and alien but familiar, if green. (NB:
I happen to think humans are alien, don't you?)
Except I don't think at all, am falling
Through space much too focused to be
Dream, except maybe much too focused,
The way you are in a dream. "That light
At the end of that tunnel," Comet sings,
"Better hope it ain't no train!" I agree,
Or I think I agree, kind of nodding.
We never know what things mean,
Better far to dream orange apples
In the fridge. I open my
Lover, I open her fan mail, I bake
Bread for her other Lovers and take
The children to a top school.
It's the Last Day
Of God's Advertising Scheme and I wake up
With Comet beside me snoring away as a lush
Aroma swirls. It's the Last Day of the Year
Of the Indecisive Knee Jerk. I'm up late,
Like a copy machine, making little changes,
Subtle respellings, on each copy. "Perhaps
A different vinegar will change your outlook,"
Says Comet, rushing me suddenly from behind,
Pouring what could only be loosely
Called "vinegar" all over me: cold, wet,
Instantly drying. "That's goooood," Comet
Continues, "You be speaking 1992 talk now."
Then the phone rings - has it been ringing
All this time? It's Louisa, saying
She's gotten together with someone.
She sounded so happy I begged her not to stop.
_________________________________________________
Well Frank Burt
wrote a soggy napkin
"The image of some imagined
nonthing somehow thingable"
I rolled it round
a lifesaving sweetness
3am Nuyorican
till the vitamins split
Then I surfaced
as he was saying
"shrouded in this gentle slag"
I'm on To Twell the Twooth!
Synchronicity vs. Poetry
cept ain't no vs.
with us.
_________________________________________________
WHAT YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND IS POETRY
IS CONNECTED TO THE BODY AGAIN
—Jean is Jean Howard
Jean allowed the body to drop
The beautiful face bluing so perfect
A fly buzzed by - but no one would believe it
She raced frantically to the offices of the National Enquirer
A reporter wrote up the story - it made the cover
Now she could get the attention of the radical newsweekly
That only told the truth
She just casually flipped it down on the desk
"Hey," an editor reading upside-down said,
"What if this story is true? It would certainly change
Our story - maybe we should look into this.
Hey! Stop those presses!"
Jean walked away. Horns were blaring,
It was a brilliant dusty sunset and the sirens were distorting.
She didn't hear em.
She was remembering her lover's face,
What they'd said about how you never know
If someone else's orgasm is better than yours
But that shoudn't stop you
From coming together
Even if it's not exactly
At the same time.
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The burden of drama
Falls on language
-- Chris Tysh
Between being in a dream
And being in a dream
While you're in a dream
What is the difference there
Dream within a dream
Is that real? What?
That what's real
Dream within a dream
What are you doing,
Dreaming? A person passing
By picks up the floor
We are discussing the
In the field the dream lopes
Within the dream, what are
You doing in this dream
Without a dream
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