Month: January 2004

Jordan didn’t include me on his hypothetical burgeoning irony panel. It should come as no surprise, because I often get left out of things. I won’t say “always” because that’s not true. I suppose everyone feels this way.

But I’ve never been asked to be on a panel. And I’ve never been asked to teach at Naropa. I would really like that.

When people write “that way”, do they truly feel inflammed with the conviction that they are “doing good”?

We are all “to the manner born.” It’s too bad, really, but I say, since we’ve got to have it, let’s shake it all about.

11

Twenty-eight stress puppies bathe by the digital kudzu,

Twenty-eight stress puppies and all so Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional;

Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so drumpy.

She owns the fine cube farm by the rise of the market, aw yeah

She hides handsome and richly cometized aft the blinds of the cobweb site.

Which of the puppies does she like the best?

Ah the most generic of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the graybar land came the twenty-ninth

idea hamster,

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with keyboard plaque, it ran from their

long hair,

Little streams egosurf’d all over their bodies.

An unseen error message also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their contracts and zones.

The young men float on their irritainment, their white bellies bulge to the

40-hour week, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who prairie dogs with co-dependent and bent-up

arch,

They do not think whom they glaze with percussive maintenance.

12

The naturalistic fallacy puts off his ostensive definition, or sharpens his idiom

at the locus of control,

I loiter enjoying his ontology and his slippage and bricolage.

Unique outcomes with grimed and hairy utterances environ the dominant discourse,

Each has his face-validity, they are all out, there is a great heat in

the chimpanzoid erasure.

From the cinder-strew’d finitism I follow their appreciative enquiry,

The lithe sheer of their felt sense plays even with their massive agonistics,

Overhand the atomic propositions swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his cogito.

13

The prana holds firmly the holistic aura of his four vibes, the Bermuda triangle massages

underneath on its out-of-body paradigm shift,

The guru that drives the long psychic energy of the crystals, steady and

tall he stands pois’d on one om on the tofu,

His blue unity exposes his whole earth and void and loosens over

his aura,

His vitamin power is calm and holistic, he tosses the granola of his ESP

away from his LSD,

The sun falls on his crispy astrology and mandala, falls on the karma of

his polish’d and perfect spirituality.

I behold the weight loss and detox and love him, and I do not stop

there,

I go with the reiki and holosync also.

In me the caresser of Tibetan rites wherever moving, backward as well as

forward sluing,

To moon lodge rites and magnetic products bending, not a person or object missing,

Absorbing all to my third eye and for this self-healing tape.

Bee products that rattle the wellness and tai chi or halt in the leafy higher awareness, what

is it that you express in your intuitive readings?

It seems to me more than all the abundance tools I have read in my life.

My prosperity invitation scares the angel art and willard-water on my distant and

day-long soulquest,

They levitate together, they slowly circle around the ectoplasm.

I believe in those wing’d juicers and astral bodies,

And acknowledge colostrum, human growth hormone, and coral calcium, playing within me,

And consider green and violet and the tufted seasilver intentional,

And do not call the paranormal abnormal because she is not something

else,

And the in the woods never studied the ambient seascapes, yet trills pretty mantras

to me,

And the look of satori shames silliness out of me.

Today’s Spam, Lineated but not Manipulated. I Kid You Not. Is this Paradise?

Now and then,

near conspiracy honor upon rex over.

Furthermore, from russula, and of playoff

fall in love with related to.

I from thread toward, or behind assimilate

around. Any sky can of, but it takes

a real foulmouth to nearest antimony over.

Most people believe that related to learn a lesson

from verge, but they need to remember how godwin.

Go near gets drunk, and about we’ll starts jejune

about lost glory; however, beyond give lectures

on morality to from.

Now and then, of operate a small fruit stand

with posture around. When around uproot

returns home, inside sweeps the floor.

Together living with is invariant.

Ululations was born in this room:

Today is also:

Assembly Line Workers’ Day

Dress up Your Pet Day

Make Your Dreams Come True Day

BIRTHDAY QUANDARY

Tomorrow’s my fortieth birhday, and aside from getting Gary to buy me stuff, I have no plans. What should I do? Any ideas?

I’ve never been forty before. I can hardly spell the word “forty.” It seems very odd.

GRATITUDINOUS

Trying (trying) to wrench myself back in (wrench!) to this time zone so I can blog about my trip!

Wrench! Slept until 11 NY time today (only 8 in SF), a fluffy feline on either side of my head. Dante! Nemo! I melt into their eyes.

Home’s coziness — no comparison. But how dare the trees have no leaves. Where are the date palms overflowing with fruit, the green hills, the line of sentry cormorants going across the lake? Bah. OK, I live on the East Coast because __________. Because why? Oh yeah, some guy convinced me to come here (some guy who now has gone a successful week without smoking, leading me to wonder — do I drive him to it?).

First order of thanks goes to Stephanie, for letting me do the crazy things I do in her gorgeous Craftsman-style living room (envy envy envy). Stephanie, by the way, is swell, a ton of fun, articulate, animated, blessed with wit. Same goes for her guy Clive, whose Christmas CD of totally obscene carols had me and Gary giggling in the living room.

And thanks to David Larsen, meow meow meow, for being his brilliant self and getting me high to boot.

Thanks to the inestimable Pat Reed for reading those Cloisters sonnets with me, the sonnets with her socks and my shoes in them. Pat is one of my favorite people to collaborate with; she takes poems right out of the air.

Thanks to Kasey and Alli for making the trip from Santa Cruz. Alli’s a gem. And Kasey, will you just please move to New York? I don’t know how much longer we can live without you.

Thanks to Laura for her incredibly reflective generous writing that scoops up and surrounds the younger writers in the community, and also for always talking about boys and fashion with me.

Thanks to Chris Stroffolino for the ride across the bay and his Costello-meets-Lou Reed-meets-Hank-Williams indie CD. But why he didn’t come to my reading? Humph. This was my first reading in the Bay Area in EIGHT YEARS!

Thanks to Kit Robinson for his book, 9:45, also for being tall and kind, and also to Nick Robinson for having stretched the limits for me of what could be possible in poetic performance.

Thanks to Alan Bernheimer also for being tall and kind and also for writing the “Most Anthologizable Lang-Poem Ever.”

And thanks to Mike Scharf, for telling me that I head to read the Matthew Arnold parody without cracking up, and just for being my HOMIE — also for introducing me to Joshua Clover.

Thanks to Cassie Lewis for her calm and joyful presence. So very good to meet her in person!

Thanks to Andrew Joron for his generous after-comments and also for assuming that I am good for Gary, whom he knew in Minneapolis.

Thanks to Stephen Vincent for saying he enjoyed “Womanish” and making the somehow elfin comment that I am “out of the cradle endlessly mocking.” Hee.

Thanks to Taylor Brady for coming despite the anxieties of tobacco cravings, and good luck on the Atelos project!

Thanks to James Meetze for coming although he had to miss my reading (theatre tickets).

Thanks to that lovely couple who recorded — they do a lit mag — I’ve forgotten their names… eek…

Thanks to Geoff Dyer and his sweet way of asking me to sign my book. Just got his Krupskaya book and will duly read.

Speaking of Krupskaya, thanks also to Jocelyn Saidenberg for coming, and the same to Yedda Morrison. We didn’t get to talk — maybe next time? Yedda is almost unlawfully beautiful, I think she should be a cult figure of some kind.

Thanks to Laynie Browne for being so lovely and also for letting me stare at her with much curiosity because Gary says that his ex-wife (soon he’ll be able to say “first wife” — how very adult!) resembles her.

Thanks to friend R. Tapp for the Hafiz calendar and the book recommendations!

Thanks to Liza for being one of the most charmng people on the planet and for giving me the copy of A Suitable Boy (good plane and insomnia reading!).

Congratulations to Jimmy for having had a kid — little Lincoln. But shame on him for not having told me.

Thanks to Becky for the spicy lunch at Brandy Ho’s and for wandering around City Lights with me.

Thanks to my MOM for taking me to get my NOSE PIERCED!

I can’t imagine a better 40th birthday present.

There are of course more thanks due and when I think of them I will add them to this list.

B+E+T+R+O+T+H+E+D