my god. what will my biographers say?
from a correspondence sent in haste.
It was nothing more than a scribbled notation;
an inclination from the borderlines.
It was uninspired, meritless and… let's see.
what else? ah, yes! dimwitted.
I don’t drink so-to-speak so I wasn’t drunk.
well, not so's you'd notice.
extreme daylight was beginning to piss me off
the way it does sometimes. well, all the time.
look. none of which is spoken here is to be seen
as an indictment of a criminal act.
but almost everyone I know is dead, or like me, soon to be.
so who's left to council in times of mediocrity?
well, that’s not fair. who am I to be granted immunity?
mea culpa. mea culpa. mea maxima culpa.
basta!–– my god. what will my biographers say?
well, nothing good I'll tell you that.
his foundational principle:
create an interior then populate it.
away from interiors the human form dominates the street scene.
witness the hotrod’s aggressive right hand turn
screeching its tires heading towards its fate.–– and so it goes.
take cover! the assassin smokes a cigarette, its trail of smoke
is a burning fuse.
and there are dreams to decipher of unaided flight and in one
he's flying and an alligator flies close by. these are the things
dreams do and if we record them they've accomplished their mission.
I'm in the backyard for a portrait. I don't recall the sky being as blue.
rare are the singular portraits of individuals and
because I’ve become one of them, suddenly I'm expensive.
before you go, look closely at his newer pictures. the depth of surface
is convincing without the use of two-point perspective.
horizontals, verticals and angles are enough to pull us through.
Uccello would have second thoughts about his illusions.
ah!..luminosity hangs like an attitude!
sure he occasionally pissed me off.
maybe he pissed you off, too, occasionally.
that was our journey as well. but wasn't it fun? wasn't it unique?
do you know what I mean?
early morning chronicle in one-liners
“Jesus Christ I only need the one key”!
there's a cardigan sweater draped over the bedroom chair
and that’s enough to call it a wardrobe.
the little stain of spaghetti sauce seems permanent
and the hamper’s a mortal sin.
the good news is.. the urine stream is blood free.
but listening to John Lennon pining: “go to a show, you hope she goes..”
brings an immediate image of Gina Scelsi.
there are times, although growing fainter, I'll fantasize a girlfriend
of the distant past to appear the same way now as she did back then
and when isolated to the brain's narrow corridors it is often true.
that alone is a good enough reason to become a poem-writer.
the art student’s left leg
In “the art student’s left leg”
we find a paralysis; an absence of motion;
a cold form element of a specific anatomy.
Its immediate creator is the hard pencil.
Its initial creator is the being, the human being
who creates then wanders off to the history of art
where everybody’s clothed and chatty
with prescribed books of art on their laps.
These books will assist in the conversation
inside the studio where art history is taught.
Yesterday it might’ve been the renaissance;
the Italian one. There are others.
The art student sits among his peers
with two legs, although the amputated
left leg sits on a page in a large pad of paper:
Strathmore. A lightly textured heavy mil.
Good stuff from the finest stand of trees
cut-down from the far-side of the world.
Possibly. Could've been Maine or Oregon.
Next time I’ll draw the right cheek of my ass.
I’ll call it “the art student’s right cheek of his ass”
and soon I’ll have a whole man made in my image!
I’ve been told this is how the God worked the form of man.
But his man is formed in clay. A messier medium, unless
the student artist is left-handed and working in charcoal.
during the otherwise scheduled regular order
during the early years, Roseanne D'Spirito,
in a crisp-white Sunday morning dress
fell from the rapidly spinning merry-go-round
in the little, tar-smeared playground across from the church
while those of us who didn’t fall, spun-on in our glee
passing her as she struggled to recover her equilibrium
in an almost freeze-frame event.
there she is! there she goes! there she is again!
as Roseanne D'Spirito, angel of the bleeding knees,
readies herself to latch-on to the first appropriate
handlebar and when it arrives, Roseanne D'Spirito, eight,
grabs the bar and runs with the speed of the platform
then leaps aboard with the grace of an Ali Shuffle!
damn the bleeding knees! this girl's no shrinking violet!
‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round spinning through what is now
herein considered to be an enlightenment to the scheduled regular order.
1951 / Columbus Park
the accelerated reader
he came over for coffee and muffins
and I slipped a book of “Selected Poems”
by William Carlos Williams toward him
from across the table.
I asked him to turn to the opening poem
and read "January Morning".
the accelerated reader opened to the page
and as quickly closed its cover.
“okay. I read it.”
he began eating the muffin at 9:15
and finished eating it at 9:22.
his body took whatever time it takes
for the digestive system to process the muffin.
an hour before the muffin's incident, my friend
drew a picture of Carles Casagemas drinking wine
at a gathering in Paris, I think.–– anyway,
it took 20 years for Casagemas to kill himself.
it took God 6 days to create the firmament before he took a nap.
it took nearly 7 years for me to murder Santa Claus
and an eternity for my hand to reach Sandra deCosta's breast
on the rolling twilight grounds of the Ponta Delgada.
as for the accelerated reader,–– a tsetse fly would’ve
taken longer to read “January Morning”.
