When I’m leaving you
what do you want
to be
left behind with?
are there memories we shared
that are
worth more than
others
I think there must be some sounds
that will
provoke
even though you think
they don’t serve
a purpose
they do you know
even if
you don’t know
It’s slow sugar releasing
eloquence into my
bloodstream
once in a life tones
taking to the air
dark and voicelike
words
tumbling down my arm
away from little
pulsing genetic
false heart
Tapping index
waking thumb
treating this pen
as my namesake
would
hardening a have time
seeing the eyes
above the suited
shirt
La la la
La la la
La
What holds a meaning
To?
La la
La la la
13000 years of careful blindness
Hey starlight
I’m slipping in Chelsea boots
on the 24th of
December
just past 12 at night
I slip fall snow
High Star Sight
this ain’t Tribeca
and it sure as hell
ain’t Sunset
but it’s me and
you know what
I’m slipping in Chelsea boots
on the 24th of December
Very black sleep
dark
curtain on the light
restless breathless
snow on
my resolve
cold crystal
muting clear
shoot eyes ahead
into next
weak
It’s not the bare run of soft breezy grass
or the tea-cup tittle of hurried mid-morning
or the languid smoke in the dour chill of sleaze.
It’s not the nearness of sex shops and flats
the pulsing yearning-work of time,
the coquettes on whom we waste our words.
It’s the sharp chiseled words on this tombstone
The fancy loved and the fight lost.
A choice few words of yours perhaps;
Buckle, lake, lamp, mariner, garden, glass,
Spring, sun, pale, smooth, soft, stamped.
Where are you taking me; what kept me?
You said it was the pleasure of hating,
knowing all our fights can be complete things,
and that the jilts are the deadly nightshade
of our common wealth.
We both hear the duns at the door
brow-hanging, contemplative, strange.
By Craig Beaumont
Leaning back car
into desert sunset
rip jeans or
wear converse green
no one tells it
like it was how
I remember it
All of them stylish
polkadotted elvisqueens
no nothing of tires
pressure, level
here looking into
what must be back
me was it
doing that u-turn
was it, my friend
Martin High, keep it
reality, we know
both of us
that it isn’t
It’s that time
he’s here now
doing whatever he does
looking through windows
walking in snow kneehigh
“these shoes are made for
pavemements” he says
leave me alone
arrange icons for expiration
say 50 years
This plane is hanging in
a storm
half a meter high when I hit
the ground
I avoid the wing
and fall
my lip cracked open
A recurring thought
no irony surrealism posturing
no time for that
in a hurry like mine
This winter I’m becoming
my own
and every day has the whole
baked in
no day without a worry
what a dream that was
Like I said
I don’t have time
for faces dinner parties discussions
this hurry
is pushing
Don’t expect cohesion
weak and strong
every day hits
the iceberg
and pulls us under
Old Man: Do you work at the doctor’s?
Young woman: yeah
How long you been there for?
Three months now
Are you a patient there?
Not yet
I work next door
Trust me you don’t wanna go there
Old man: What are you getting for christmas?
Young woman with two young sons: What are you getting son, don’t know yet, do ya?
(the young boys are eating cross-buns, drinking orange juice, dangling their feet, just looking around, holding the buns with both hands, taking very small bites, not really touching the juice)
A man takes the subway all day to avoid reception on his cell-phone
That’s the here and now only
A girl avoids her boyfriend by sleeping at a friend’s house
This has been going on for some time
Little Ned needs to be set straight, he thinks he can scream as loud as he can on the bus
An antelope dies from Cheetah bites, I know
Brimming with confidence dreams life starts to resembles lifes dreams.
A house gets infected with bird-mites and nothing is done, period
A friend wondered how one started philosophy
Think about it, he said
Bank accounts with money, lots of money
Think about it. Don’t think about it
These are the lines that open the song “I Am The Cosmos” written by Chris Bell, onetime deceased member of the band: Big Star
Existed: 1971-1974
Reputation: One of pop and rock’s most influential bands
Commercial success: None while operational, growing steadily since the early 90’s
Influenced: REM, Teenage Fanclub, legions of others…
The same thing happens when a girl and a boy meet at a party, a dinner, at someone’s house. They’ve been walking unaware for twenty odd years. They meet, and it’s so obvious that every step (breath) they ever took, was made preparing for this one. Worlds collide, fuse, absorb each other, become banal.
Before I was born some tracks were laid down. We walked, like autumn hornets, in separate worlds for 26 years. And then, we met, making infinite sense.
December boys got it bad.
The things I see
in this life
on the one hand
reactions to a culture
on the other
living in that culture
getting very angry and afraid
I know who I am
I love you
but I’m afraid
my fashion is my
culture but not really
I’m angry and I love you
very much
is the object of poetry
to have an idea? To be
understood. Is meant to
make you feel
I’m angry I am, careless
honestly, ironic beyond
historically detached
I only care about creating
emotions
I only care about creating poems
I only care about these poems
I want them to be good
I only care about them
What strange atmosphere
in here
like military canteen
with great exotic cuisine
served with scorn
and speed and leaves
These are sounds I just heard:
ooh, honk, Chinese talking
slurping, two glasses clanking
many plates stashed
a pot of tea put down
and myself coughing
too much chilly oil at once
(and by the way I know about
politics economics culture
philosophy technology science
the public the private
the sacred the profane
sex gender
race racism
then now
wrong right
immigration genocide
soft hard
fusion tribal
LA New York
nationalism NATO
doping docudrama
the internet irony
good bad
entrepreneurialism new left
Converse Nike
Vietnamese cuisine
Pre-Raphaelites
white sharks otters
Napoleon Bonaparte)
I’m sitting in an art gallery/museum
it’s nice and quiet in the
19th century
whereas over the court
there is so much frantic
effort to understand the world
I’m tempted to say, stop and
take a look. Some ideas should
not become art. They are ideas, they
entertain you for ten minutes
then they become ideas
and no art again
The brain is powerful but
I couldn’t will myself to
love someone now could I
intellectual contemporary art
I’m tempted to ask
but I refrain
Just sit and watch Turner
“Spithead”(1807-09) and think
about those ships and your
own life, or don’t. Just
look at it and walk out
after a while into December
It’s not yours to grapple with
I hate these times and I enjoy
these times, I don’t know
tell your kid that you think he or she is great
and that you love him or her
[The New York Poets: an anthology
John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, edited by Mark Ford]
There have always been motions to declare the death of some forms of writing in order to facilitate the birth of new ones. The poetry of the New York poets emerging in the 50’s and 60’s didn’t have to do this. It didn’t care. Not in an intentional way, it just didn’t. Instead it was occupied with the world as world, and not as a battleground of rights and wrongs within literary expression.
It said: I have a thought, an emotion, a hunch; I can write about it. It said: I’m inspired by this painting, this piece of music, this traffic-jam; I can write about it. And so changed the way poetry saw the world, the way we saw the world, and the world, it changed too. No small feat for lines of ink on paper.
This anthology traces the major developments of four writers that have come to epitomize a poetry that is “dying to see the truth”. A poetry that makes you laugh out loud and cry your most heartfelt tears within the distance that separates two stanzas. (Also avaliable from Carcanet)
I stopped at the great-looking wind-swept farm
that sold fruit and vegetables
and went in to see if I could find
something for the road
Over the strawberries I saw a cloud
of flies and the apples were covered in them too
but the girl by the till was smiling
at me
It was us two, the smiling girl and me
inside this shack by the road over
which one fell into the pacific
without too much care
I picked up two nectarines
she put in a paper bag and she smiled
alone as I gave her something like a dollar
to keep
I had seen humpback whales that day
and now I was staring over the bay
the strong wind in my face
the horizon a golden woolen promise
I’m local, she said, like a bumper sticker, I said
A hand grenade under the snow, more like
Good day will there be anything, perhaps
as I can combine urge, he argued
with anything substantial
that something’s on, I heard
I know, you said
how beautiful you were
when five million speckles of dust
shaved my retina
those who sit with their head in their hands are
out, OK?
What kind of a man was I?
don’t be sad the crystals of snow, I know
only care about skin that makes them melt away, anyway
you kept an artery up to the light, how street
The breeze went from warm to
nobody gets home (nobody), I said
tonight a minor explosion is all we can hope for
I will start recommending books from now on. First out is an autobiography I read two years back. A book I keep thinking of almost every week since.
The Book is Klaus Mann’s Autobiography ‘The Turning Point’, and describes a life led in the shadows of Thomas Mann, Klaus’ father (the great master of the modern European novel)
As a testament to a half-century of upheaval, this story of hope and love, of intelligence and talent, of exile and tragedy, is as riveting as any, and has been described as one of the best autobiographies of all time.
The book is not too easy to come by, so if you happen to do so - buy it.
If someone came up to you and asked: what does Fictary mean? You would answer: Oh so you read that great blog too. And then you’d smile and say: To me it means the world, and you wouldn’t be lying. You wouldn’t. If you had a sore shoulder that day, a fictary description would allow that fact some leeway. It would become a great wound, a sleeping disaster and something you could barter with. Everyone needs some intimacy. Use yours. I plan to fictary my way into a different mood soon, and it’ll be great. I envy myself this ability, this writing self of mine. I admire him too. Not too much. Just enough. But back to the manifestly more interesting part of this. Now that I’ve taken up sides there’s no going back. I’ll try to of course. I’m stupid that way, thinking 30 seconds back and forth. Could you mention my yellow motorbike you think, and the way that I sing as I catch bullets with my imagination? And my castle in Uruguay. I sold it sometime back. Oh just do it, will you - for me?
The double basses, fully carved flatbacks, three of them, reverberated with such force I could hardly sit still. They sounded like a ballroom crowd, the wood squeaking under the weight of 500 hundred heels, the bows in unison and arms and hands in unison up and down the neck. She was sitting behind the mezzo-soprano just to the left of the tenor. Hair cut fashionably. But there was nothing high-street about her. I Looked at her. Lightly holding the violin and reading the music. She looked at me. And I swear I was lost again. I closed my eyes. Dies Irae. Let the bass thump a hole in my anterior abdominal wall. I would deserve it.
In winter its warm in California
In winter its cold in New York
In winter its winter
at the American Museum of Natural History
I’m looking for someone with a bare chest
who paddles in eternity
Guggenheim around again
listen, is that Frank
I hate you sky
I love you sky
Can you pour hours over me