Monday, December 31, 2012

Rudolfo Carrillo


Sonnet Sixteen: Saltwater and Smoke

The past, or rather the world created
by expired occurrences and dangling
actions remains out of reach. The
inchoate symphony in everyman’s left eye,
is a globe of indeterminate composition
and volume. Arms cannot grasp such
roundly articulate implications. Its girth
is unitary and expansive in directions
previously dismissed as outlandish,
as not befitting the shabby wizardry
defined on a Cartesian plane and
primarily used as a basis for moving
wind-driven, wooden caverns filled with men
and their produce across the vasty deep.

***
***

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Paul Howell



Late Beethoven Fugues on West 86th Street

Late Beethoven  fugues  are  strong  boys  wanting  to  and  going  in  and girls wanting to be wanted following running up the stairs and the girls dashing in and rushing up the stairs  to  keep  a  distance between  them  and  the  boys  who dash in and rush up the stairs after them not knowing wanting or the chase just flitting like bees  to  the  next  shiny  buttercup  no  more  deliberate  than  unavoidable and a third wave of boys wanting to and going in and girls wanting to be wanted following running up the stairs. That’s what was going on on West 86th Street last Sunday. The May flowers were pollinating little accelerandos all over the place. You can’t shape better Old Ludwig Van than that. Old Ludwig Van Old Ludwig Van Old Ludwig Van Vaan Vaaan!

***
***

Russ Golata


Perceptional Fortitude
open the door
already ajar
 
see the mountain top
without climbing
 
believing
everything-everywhere
 
vibration
the source
 
listen
music speaks
 
your heart
knows

***
***

Friday, December 28, 2012

Lawrence Upton



Old island a hill now, high land out of lower land; below, a cultivated plain; above, a lake,
islands and bits of flotsam and a bedstead near the shore.

A big red tree and a mass of birdshit. Oyster beds and a cliff barricaded by warning signs.
The signs glissen and scintillate -- afternoon rain. A car goes past.

These various compositions of light and sound. All this noise the sunset coming,
boisterous, in my head. Reality is so big it’s hardly noticeable.

Appearance of goods from heaven, death, that sort of thing, you understand? -- the reality
-- these inexplicable things and these things that I see that you don’t, apparently, you say.
We can’t talk about them if you can’t admit to them; not until you do; and I have no words
and that does, whatever you say, limit me, the vocabulary, like not being able to make
notes of a complex subject - you start to forget what you have established or been told,
like going into the forest and the sun clouding over. You can navigate with a compass and
that’s part of the vocabulary, what we have made rather than what we have grown up with.
You think I’m rambling in my own words. You don’t see any problems, but then you don’t
see anything much. No built environment beyond the human mess, no contrivance that we
have not made. It is extraordinary. Never mind.

***
***

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Anthony Robinson


Open


From twig to branch each opening is next—
Siren, lichen, post-temporal

Majesty.

*

Today something happened big.
Today minor susurrations bled into being.
My mouth was open & things came out.

*

A happening on a twig is a bug.
You on a twig—

a small bit perfected.

***
***

Monday, December 17, 2012

Victoria Marinelli


Lament for Wilhelmina

Someone named Wilhelmina
– no last name given –
once owned my copy of Ferlinghetti’s
A Coney Island of the Mind.
Bagged beast of my bookstore
prowls, in every off-season,
I’ve found this
volume with its ankles caught
in rusted traps of used
romances, Westerns, sci-fi.
Wilhelmina, what have you done?
I’ve plundered your dead dreams
and have you to thank
for freeways fifty lanes wide
and steamheated cemeteries

***
***

Philip Meersman


Poets of my Fatherland



Curlcirkly  
               Gezellosy   
                                   Shopply




Burning
re yearning

wordrepressing
Consciense reading.



The blue porsche
evades                         scr eeeeeeeeeeeeeee chchching

Bang klang dingelombomkom
droomboom tsjulpkulpdulpbulb
tuuwietwietawazawiet



Chalk lines languish away
drippingflowed sadness
Claustrofobic away


TL-lamps                               cling


BA live!

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Catherine Daly



In the Garden


Non Serviam

Light falls,
respects
no source.

Said, done:
light bends,
time dilates.

Emit, detect
nothing, heaven, limit.

Transgress.

And,
the compact
impure,

suggests sacraments. 
The very idea,
true thing. 

Knowledge is a beautiful crime.

InterestFascinate , don’t upset,mouths:
their teeth biteing sins’ fruits.
Eat what you can get:
blood, malice, love.


*wantonness lulled to sleep
with the virgin’s lute,
or sated with her love
                William Blake


I served what animatesd bodies, was served:
evoked, varied, twisted it,
coiled it
like a serpent.
I myself was served




Memory, madness, error:
I served perception,
demolished beauty, light,
defeated sun,  moon, sun.

***

***

Hugh Seidman


Like Anyone

Grace, action, redemption. 
Lies, jokes, truth, faking truth.

Teeth gnashed, nauseous, nauseated.

Remembering, forgetting war. 
Moments, a day.

Did the back hurt? 
Did it hurt to stand?

Hand held by hands.

Anyone, a neighbor, say. 
Sick unto death.

Saying what is said of the strength to go on.

Whether or not: strength. 
Whether or not: one went on.

Like anyone.

          Cincinnati Review 2005, rev. 2012

***

The Train Explodes

The train explodes. 
One pays the fare. 
Snow falls in a song. 
A door closes.

One pays the fare. 
There is a platform. 
A door closes. 
Words explain.

There is a platform. 
There is a timetable. 
Words explain. 
Dark is a metronome.

There is a timetable. 
Stars implode. 
Dark is a metronome. 
Fear halts desire.

Stars implode. 
Snow falls in a song. 
Fear halts desire. 
The train explodes.

          Cincinnati Review 2005, rev. 2012

***
***

Friday, December 14, 2012

Alicia Askenase


Modest Elegy

               en memoria de Modesto Solans Mur

Gris sky we crossed Barcelona
Cataluña for Barbastro of Aragon

your birth at your end site she:
nada of hospitals for you to me

admit el querer crept and burnt
stages us out recall indoor sitios
the last time we never
danced into situations
of pequeñitas side streets shops
of feathers simply encantado
por possessive apostrophes’
case with no of, good-bye dear

Valencia blue hands back sun
to water stroke flight laps
dusk patterns you said
once jugador de baloncesto
as if it were a sentence to love

him but I did and gave a vuelta
to you deeply in your dark I
chose not tú follow which
would have had no now o
future, señor had-the-blues
nodding to the sea’s
final playa Las Ramblas
we-never-got-to part

yet yes by Andalusían rooftop whitewash spray painted joint
at southern most tip of continent the stars washed a pool
there too not dip a toe in its then now what
matters the voluptuous candid immediate

***
***

John Oughton



***
***

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Philip Meersman


Meanwhile in Budapest


Out of a blue sky
a thunderstorm ambushed
the breakfast crowd
a gigantic grass stampeed
naked fish
steamed in a railroadcan
midst essences of hormonal mouthwash

They – like cattle ready for slaughter – stared@
a squadron of the Spanish Armada
searching frentic

Picasso left
already
with Gauguin
to the south of France
Courbet, Corot and Rodin
guided me
to
Christ Carrying the Cross

(again you might think
doesn’t he get tired
of carrying
that heavy load!?),

but this time
Sebastiano del Piombo
made Him do it.

(And how!)

1.     In a penitency cloak
haloing sadness
and inner pain
2.     With long fingers stretched tired
over the beam
as was it the moment
before blowing on a frail flute
a funeral elegy
3.     Against a carbon grey background
absorbing the obscured surrounding
dissolving into the panel in which His Sorrow is kept.

His Pain varnished the pigment
His Blessing lacquered the varnish

Mas mojitos” seemed to be the answer to all party preguntas

***

Brussels




Swamp, Village, City, Iris
Museums stuffed, dinosaurs
Pissing girl, pissing boy
Cathedral, chorus, Ode of Joy
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Pentagon, small ring, Leopold,
Louise, Haren, Laeken. Hold!
Neder-over-heembeek.
Who to assimilate next? Strombeek
Waterloo, Braine, Rode or Anderlecht?
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Fortifications, Revolution, Frenchification, EU
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Baudelaire, Blanc and Boulanger
They fled here due to grave danger
Jacques Louis David
Painted and ran, vite vite vite
Dumas, Hugo and Proudhon too
They wrote around here a book or two
And than there was Rodin
At Bourse - they say - enfin
He sculpted nudes to feed his kin
Africa - Asia, the original sin
A writer and trader of coffee and tea
Welcome the writer Multatuli
Verlaine, Rimbaud poetically rebelled
Engels and Marx, even got expelled
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Brel, Bertrand and Thielemans
Let’s here it, any fans?
and yeah (oh God) Marc Dutroux
He’s on my list of people too
Erasing evil with the Singing Nun
She sang until her cross was hung
Audrey Hepburn film-dream mythology
Lévi-Strauss structural anthropology
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Peyo drew smurfs
Hergé Tintin
Poelaert buildings, eclectic sin
The list goes on
with Tits and Tome
Spaak, Toussaint, Van Damme, Tramont
van Istendael, Vesalius too
Impressive, isn’t it, this who’s who.
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Arno, Barnard, Béjart and Brouwers
Brueghel, Bucquoy with his panties with flowers
Erasmus, Horta, Hoxha, Magritte
Merckx, the Canibal, are also in this heat
Solvay, the chemist, the business, but, look
van der Weyden, Van Gogh, yeah Vincent, and van Ruysbroeck
HUB, VUB, ULB
Erasmus and Saint-Louis
The officers of the military
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Old politics, new politics, unemployment, gay,
Magreb, Congo, the US and the UK
Russia, China, Asia, Africa,
intercultural monologue, asylum seeking algebra
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
advertize
africanize
americanize
arabize
balkanize
barbarize
bastardize
colonize
colorize
commercialize
communalize
demonize
dogmatize
dramatize
emotionalize
eroticize
europeanize
feminize
fetishize
feudalize
fossilize
ghettoize
legalize
merchandize
patronize
penalize
radicalize
stigmatize
terrorize
trivialize
urbanize
vandalize
victimize
vulgarize
compromize
USS Enterprise
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
Bashing, slashing, attacking and winning
Parliaments, governments, Councils and predicaments
Ministries, committees, agencies, communities,
Asylum seekers, NGO’s, Representatives and fugitives,
Journalists, socialists, communists,
economists, anarchists, lobbyists,
politicians, physicians, doctors, nurses,
diplomats, bureaucrats, eurocrats, curses
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.
We are Brussels. Lower your shields, surrender yourself. Resistance is futile.

***
***


Monday, December 10, 2012

Lynda Schor



***
***

Ruth Lepson


of all the books
that came in the mail
the one I wanted to read most

was yours I know you
pretty well now and that
helps too

I’ll bet you 10 bucks I said
he said ok I bet it’s
a hill we kept driving

toward it between the bare trees
it was huge navy blue with lines of
pink ink and at the top looked

craggy like hills but

it was one cloud
covering the bottom of the sky

you could think of it as
beautiful but you could
imagine the end of the world

as some do in these long thin
days as
the century gets started shakily

I was too hard on them
and not hard enough
I should have distanced myself

but the fury twirled us
around in twisters fits
it’s not a question of whether they

could help it or not it’s

what pertained

yvonne told nancy
when you’re in a wheelchair no one
talks to you

when I left the museum
everything was a painting
one painting
hundreds of tiny paintings
the guard rail on the highway reflecting
the towers of pollution the tiny hands

an awareness that we’re all here
like fish minions
like scholars fleabag hotels

it’s lifted from the landscape
once I noticed it everywhere—in the backs

of falling down barns in the diners of
small towns in the weeds in back of the
project in the christmas lights

it’s gone it was
melancholy
it disappeared dried up

is an answer in
something felt
the moon’s as small as a necco wafer

hart crane’s father
invented life savers

to keep things
to yourself

I think you were wrong

a butterfly eaten by a dragon
a dinosaur under the covers
fluky —I imagined miro

saying come out & play then thought
of calder
who then appeared in the crossword

whiff of what’s unresolved
think of arp since he
photographs inside a brain

his poems mention sitting
in the pre-dawn which
destabilized me

it seems he
has no feeling while
sitting and I admired

him all those years
now I

sit in the pre-dawn light
ready to see it without flight
once we went riding through the woods

on his harley there were no paths we
stopped he gave me a joint my first
time a cop heard us pulled up to

the woods’ edge & started walking in give
me the joint, he said and he ate it this
was

a homophone of
myself then

I want to get it
down why
I walked in a field of blue grass

while the horses were waking

the world is substantial lately
with ribbons of
gratification

how they reappear disguised as
others we knew others the seemingly
same

right as rain
I awoke from an ancient dream

nothing to do
but work and sit
through it

***
***