Leave it all here,
where we could be friends

as if the world isn’t ending.
A night before black waves.
.                    .                    .

Make the noise your silence
and I will grant you a freedom

of mind. To see the rocks as wind,
to know their voices as whispering.
.                    .                    .

It’s one last day, we have
to atone for our dads’ mistakes

when the ceiling falls in blocks.
I hope you can cry yourself if.
.                    .                    .

My tongue wags, a summer dog,
here for the dry days to expel

a forgotten boy. How I dreamt you
would be how you are not except.
.                    .                    .

The lulling fragment of memory
moistens and casts full feeling. Don’t

forget the hardships you’ve borne
to make a you out of you were not yet.

5:00 pm  •  20 May 2013  •  29 notes

“Through habits of thought, feeling and judgment, a poet looks at things a little more peculiarly, if not entirely more peculiarly, than others. For one thing, the habit of esthetic rather than moral values tends to absorb one’s attention and one’s ‘slant.’ This may even amount to a prejudice, and at the very least is a strong bias.”

— Frank O’Hara, “Autobiographical Fragments” (via adornoble)

6:35 pm  •  19 May 2013  •  11 notes

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

— Don DeLillo, White Noise (via larmoyante)

6:35 pm  •  19 May 2013  •  539 notes

It’s so constricting/ down weeds bloomed

2:00 pm  •  18 May 2013  •  3 notes

infinitesplinters:

Any prompts out there tonight?

So I get “a blind man walks into a bar” (thank you s&s!) and spatula love & moose hatred, Zjoot!? Sheesh. I’m a writer not a miracle worker….

11:33 pm  •  17 May 2013  •  5 notes

A blind man walks into a bar,
His friends greet him with a riff.

The brick simmers in the light,
A plaid shirt creeps into his voice

Like a mechanical piano playing
A Joplin rag: sand-dusty keys.

Living in me, a turning palace,
Where I walk from to meet

My dream as other people.
It’s a long receipt of scores,

Questions I can’t answer if
The sky has already bloomed.

If Rex were here he’d laugh,
Because I can’t write a villanelle.

The seeing pretend to be blind
For there’s a glint of Southern sun

Echoing through the dark noise
We embark on in speaking aloud.

Hands rise to meet the moon
Even if she sleeps loudly:

The astronauts have yet to retire.
Where is my suit, besides this tie and wrists?

Where the blind may fall in silence,
Conceals a tank-top secret I love.

They turn their hats backward to signify
An identity written through brown birds

And when the sky falls we will see,
But he’ll keep singing Bob Seger and smile

As the wind whips a corrective eyelash,
And my tongue fades before the bright day.

11:23 pm  •  17 May 2013  •  32 notes

Any prompts out there tonight?

10:19 pm  •  17 May 2013  •  5 notes

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke (via alibis-not-needed-anymore)

10:48 am  •  17 May 2013  •  14 notes

infinitesplinters:

Ode to Quentin Compson’s Screaming Ghost

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” 
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”
- John Cougar Mellencamp as recounted by Frederick the King

Fuck that noise, let’s fall back into our maze
of dreams, each deeper and more complicated
like the streets in a city built on Indian trails,
better than any Nolan film. I slipped and fell
and wound up talking to a homeless man with
cell phone chargers and hotel bottles of gin and
ideas for a dream, played Animal Collective for him,
talked about capitalism, and he asked me
what I’d do with a sixteen million dollar lotto ticket.
I said that’s too big. I only know about shadows
reflecting on the squared concrete rows before
a statue, a bank, wind, and rich people. His name
is Frederick the King, he says the Black Man is finished.
He says he knew it once he saw a Mexican happily
swinging from window to window with only one rope
for support. The time of the Black Man is over, he says.
But is means was, that there once was, and what was
the time of the Black Man? Was it better than this?
We shaved their faces and threw away the blades.
Ants tapping the foundation of park benches at midnight.

I asked DWP about my attendant anxieties about racial
slurs while he was snapchatting some lovely sleeping girl
and eating too much ice cream: twenty-first century aporia.
Terrible Megachurch Tuesday indeed. With Frederick,
we ended up sharing a drink and a thought and sixteen million
would give me an Eliot pause. A piece of garbage waving
in the breeze and Kevin Spacey is a prick. A huge white
blanket, covering all the colors. Some black guy
shot another black guy last week, therefore, done.
Tolerated until excuses can be made,
formal documentation of his animal nature:
inhuman, can’t be with us, fire him, etc.
He has two phones in his bag, A to B, but could he use a friend?
Of course, we all could. Shit runs downhill: manhood is judged
by dead white men crawling in your wallet. Cattle in the street
ready for slaughter, a preacher who sells dreams and tithes,
hooked Haze Motes on his blind drugs, blinding the blindness
(we’re all Haze). Reconcile your whiteness, even when
the pasty thing you see in the mirror walks you in through
doors others wouldn’t dare try. I feel tired and empty,
maybe that’s what whiteness is. Nothing, nothing at all.
Just a shadow waving on the pavement waiting for
something to pass. I guess this is how Quentin Compson
felt, except I went to Tufts, not Harvard. I want to watch
Sutpen’s Hundred burn, too, but my dad has been dead
for five years already and all he built was a psychiatry
department. And I tried to burn that place down, I did.
But all I was doing was setting fire to little scraps of paper
at noon on a sunny Georgia day. A flame watching itself burn
itself to blackness, and being content, rests and watches the lights
go out. Fuck you Charlie Nemeroff, I hope those Paxil suicides
are on your mind in Miami right now. They’re on mine:
a blank nothing staring at a computer screen in the dark.
Fred tells me about the peregrine falcons dropping dead
pigeons next to the building during the day. Suntrust protects
them, likely because they purge the concrete of something
that reminds them of the human waste they serve everyday
or that weary look people give you when you begin
telling your life story unsolicited, because, it is so heavy
here in America when we get too close to the soil.
I wish they would remind me of second grade
because I don’t remember those years, those dead pigeons.

And then he stomped on his shades and he was gone.
He said call me, we got to talk once you got your building
with your name on it, not just your poppa’s. He recited his poem
to me and I transcribed, like a good child, but all I could think
of was class, their white eyes staring at me through
their brown masks,
and like quentin i want to scream

i don’t. i don’t! i don’t hate it! i don’t hate it!

but all that slips through this grey dust of me is

cracker cracker cracker cracker cracker

fucking cracker crumbs
the pigeons scooped up
before they got eaten
the falcons smile
and ruffle their dark wings
pleased with living
atop such high, immobile, pale places

(via carljungjr)

9:30 am  •  17 May 2013  •  15 notes

Ode to Quentin Compson’s Screaming Ghost

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” 
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”
- John Cougar Mellencamp as recounted by Frederick the King

Fuck that noise, let’s fall back into our maze
of dreams, each deeper and more complicated
like the streets in a city built on Indian trails,
better than any Nolan film. I slipped and fell
and wound up talking to a homeless man with
cell phone chargers and hotel bottles of gin and
ideas for a dream, played Animal Collective for him,
talked about capitalism, and he asked me
what I’d do with a sixteen million dollar lotto ticket.
I said that’s too big. I only know about shadows
reflecting on the squared concrete rows before
a statue, a bank, wind, and rich people. His name
is Frederick the King, he says the Black Man is finished.
He says he knew it once he saw a Mexican happily
swinging from window to window with only one rope
for support. The time of the Black Man is over, he says.
But is means was, that there once was, and what was
the time of the Black Man? Was it better than this?
We shaved their faces and threw away the blades.
Ants tapping the foundation of park benches at midnight.

I asked DWP about my attendant anxieties about racial
slurs while he was snapchatting some lovely sleeping girl
and eating too much ice cream: twenty-first century aporia.
Terrible Megachurch Tuesday indeed. With Frederick,
we ended up sharing a drink and a thought and sixteen million
would give me an Eliot pause. A piece of garbage waving
in the breeze and Kevin Spacey is a prick. A huge white
blanket, covering all the colors. Some black guy
shot another black guy last week, therefore, done.
Tolerated until excuses can be made,
formal documentation of his animal nature:
inhuman, can’t be with us, fire him, etc.
He has two phones in his bag, A to B, but could he use a friend?
Of course, we all could. Shit runs downhill: manhood is judged
by dead white men crawling in your wallet. Cattle in the street
ready for slaughter, a preacher who sells dreams and tithes,
hooked Haze Motes on his blind drugs, blinding the blindness
(we’re all Haze). Reconcile your whiteness, even when
the pasty thing you see in the mirror walks you in through
doors others wouldn’t dare try. I feel tired and empty,
maybe that’s what whiteness is. Nothing, nothing at all.
Just a shadow waving on the pavement waiting for
something to pass. I guess this is how Quentin Compson
felt, except I went to Tufts, not Harvard. I want to watch
Sutpen’s Hundred burn, too, but my dad has been dead
for five years already and all he built was a psychiatry
department. And I tried to burn that place down, I did.
But all I was doing was setting fire to little scraps of paper
at noon on a sunny Georgia day. A flame watching itself burn
itself to blackness, and being content, rests and watches the lights
go out. Fuck you Charlie Nemeroff, I hope those Paxil suicides
are on your mind in Miami right now. They’re on mine:
a blank nothing staring at a computer screen in the dark.
Fred tells me about the peregrine falcons dropping dead
pigeons next to the building during the day. Suntrust protects
them, likely because they purge the concrete of something
that reminds them of the human waste they serve everyday
or that weary look people give you when you begin
telling your life story unsolicited, because, it is so heavy
here in America when we get too close to the soil.
I wish they would remind me of second grade
because I don’t remember those years, those dead pigeons.

And then he stomped on his shades and he was gone.
He said call me, we got to talk once you got your building
with your name on it, not just your poppa’s. He recited his poem
to me and I transcribed, like a good child, but all I could think
of was class, their white eyes staring at me through
their brown masks,
and like quentin i want to scream

i don’t. i don’t! i don’t hate it! i don’t hate it!

but all that slips through this grey dust of me is

cracker cracker cracker cracker cracker

fucking cracker crumbs
the pigeons scooped up
before they got eaten
the falcons smile
and ruffle their dark wings
pleased with living
atop such high, immobile, pale places

10:47 pm  •  16 May 2013  •  15 notes

“And by the way my friend I’m tired of being asked to define WHY ART is useful! How about someone explaining WHY WAR is useful? How about THAT! Tell me why war is useful and THEN I’ll give you reasons for art! If it were not for art you and I would be DEAD from the misery we could never rid ourselves of without it, HOW IS THAT for an answer? ANYONE who has loved this world with art knows what I say to be true!”

— CAConrad (via adornoble)

9:13 pm  •  16 May 2013  •  53 notes

iron-poet-i:

Congratulations to the winners of Iron Poet round one!

Foolcrow, Logorrheads, Miss Castalian, Syntax and Semantics, Conversing in Metaphors, Eoten, Alibis not Needed Anymore, and Rouged Landscapes! 

I’ll post the more specific judgments later on (tonight hopefully) but I’m crunched for time and I wanted to make sure to keep things moving. 

Here are the prompts for round 2, Four landscape photos by Marcin Sobas

Read More

Well done to all the contestants! Some really tough match-ups, I thought. Kudos to Zjoot and the judges as well.

9:06 pm  •  16 May 2013  •  11 notes

I had to discern, mostly by inspiration,
on that side of the road,

badgered by dreams, perhaps.
So Ivan Iylitch is dead!

who was a prince of his kind,
I will write you a few lines:

done most to bring him to New York.
Therefore, there was no GOAT.

Phoebe felt very much in the mood;
but it takes much folly, sin, or misery,

even go so far as to enjoy the experience,
his intention of turning in.

This I was afterwords told:
the day had been wet

and then crept quietly away.
Somehow she failed to make friends,

devoted herself now to the pleasure of
physical violence. Was horrible. To her,

were illuminating their underground palaces
thrown upon the beach.

Seed Text: Timed Readings in Literature,  Book Five (1989)

3:11 pm  •  15 May 2013  •  11 notes

bisected apartments/ a whale beached & gurgling/ water info-graphs renumerate

11:55 am  •  15 May 2013  •  2 notes

“a sky all water as we wake / a number without number”

— Clark Coolidge (via uutpoetry)

11:45 am  •  15 May 2013  •  20 notes