I'm starting a poetry thread for myself. I want feedback, feedback, feedback!

1.
From the East Remote field, at first, I saw
nothing but trees, and on a second look, I
saw buildings and this is a sign, this is a sign.
From the telescopic level, this is people and
products and cars. Products of systems and wars.
And the layers of history's memories.
On the microscopic level, I saw social relations
smelling and soaking and breathing eachother's smoke
stroking eachother's wings and tapping eachother
with feelers.
with pheromones
with vigor.
Exachange and sweet, buzzing invertebrates,
nestled in the bark of a mighty tree.
And under the tree, there's a Dreamer wrapped in the roots
lulled by logorrhea and the drumming of tokyo streets
Those streets where we mumbling rumbling insects
are Wiring in coffe shops, revelling party and moaning
in the placental cracks of the bark.
We sweet rumbling children are climbing
and catching our legs on the barbed wire,
Trespassing on a Baja seaside low tide ranch,
Not hesitating for permission because we wanted
To finger fossils nestled in the cliff under
Earthen memories & then still sit in the damp sand,
eating with our hands Before high tide comes and
pulls one more fossil down for the journey
into the throat of Charybdis
We are hallucinating salvia solypsisms into and
vulgarly shoved out of dorm room 3/4s mirrors.
Shuddering wondering how deeply cut the ends
of the universe are by the world outside
of it and its kaleidescope hearthtrob gaze.
Or how hungrily the void yearns for the tree's
ultimate decay.
And what an awkward fit!--all this matter
and motion twirling over a yawning pit.
Looks to me like layers of graffiti musing memories
The lessons of love written on the walls
Missives of peace on bathroom stalls
Spitting cosmomaniacal poems
The way a lovelorn scribble that barely rhymes
bleeds into a drawing of mushrooms patterned
in time... this is a sign, this is a sign.
And I left staring out at Santa Cruz for New Orleans
Where vanilla waifs and queer romantics
shoveled through sludge and layers of
human memories to keep the coiling
roots of profit out of the Ninth Ward
Where also our cots and the rain falling
on your saccrin rum company was a
loving... reward.
Louisiana fog licked toxic soil and
Piety & Desire are streets running parrallel,
Bishop's slanging flood bud to volunteers
who buy love with good works and who
Give love like you drop a coin into a plate.
And the survivors are crowned by
The Dead so they can dodge military
Police the way the ninth ward dodged fate.
So I left NOLA, north, for the gray
naked forests that were green in the deep.
With december.
With my brother.
With Antiedom's innocence and its grassy,
rolling pastures, beckoning my feet.
For the Bible Belt's Buckle, where riches
are rare, but friendship is cheap.
En route for New York to midwife the new year
Dancing in the five AM gogol bordello in Brooklyn
under layers of immigrant memories
Where the Hasidim prepare to mourn
for another year without Zion
Whilst we France and Germany in musician flats
We sweet rumbling children of Access and Internet
are wandering the planet, precocious and promiscuous
Leaving a trail of would-have-been kids
with momentary lovers into condoms and throats
this massive web of "almost-meant-something" half-sisters
and "could-have-loved-him" step-brothers
and all of this networking, webbing of
Potential families may some day become so heavy
that The Dreamer will wake & rip root right out.
Cast the Mighty Tree into the throat of Charybdis
and we warm, wandering, children
will nestle
In the bark
of another Tree.

2.
Went to the Social Room again tonight.
it wasn't a total waste, but I felt all right
just came in to look around and let my dark side baste
Barbarian Queen sat on her throne with her leather and her lace
and the way she looked at me when I came in lit candles in the place.
Yeah, her smile's a rolling comfort, and the wrinkles around her eyes
swept away my boyhood, and everyone watched her surprise.
I told her I wasn't coming, earlier today,
that friends and job and family had gotten in the way
But your head can't stop the force and the go
when your pants and your heart are directing the flow
Daytime finds her in elastic denim pants
but tonight, the Barbarian Queen's court is simply in a trance.
And I've come to join it, with merriment and drink.
The kinksters and the gimps, they really give me time to think.
It's a basement bar and waitresses are there for the scene.
There's a mattress in the corner, and it's bouncing with muffled screams.
Yeah, it's difficult, usually, not to get hard,
with the girls and their curls and their metal toys
Yeah, some of the older ones are marred,
and no one's waiting for the boys.
Jingo, the deviant with a felt tipped heart
sits at his table with eyes like a dart
and they shoot into me just when I get in
but we never talk, so I just grin.
Grabbing a drink, I take a look around
This is it, boys, the sexual underground.
Men in leather, cutting cards, idling with their stakes,
are hoping their wives and daughters aren't waiting for them awake
I guess sometimes I feel a little young to be chilling with this crowd.
But the crack of a whip makes it easier, and it's usually the only thing that loud.
Loud enough to wash away pretty much everyone's guilt,
loud enough to remind us that pleasure is why we're built.
The air's thick and there's sweat beading on the walls,
and I recognize everyone by name, or at least by the name they'll call.
And Bird snuggles in behind me, with her lips upon my neck,
then dives for the beer on tap leaving me a goofy wreck.
So I make myself a seat, tip my hat to the Tantrick Master.
Bird brings me a cigarette and we both begin to get plastered.
I met Bird here, must have been about a year ago,
I paddled her white ass red, and we walked home in the snow
I think they envy us our age, the people in the room
marriage in a boring bed will never be our doom
Here jokes are told, and I lose my shirt, and often times my belt,
with a redhead wench walking past, showing off her welts.
So I smooth in next to a father who's a cross-dressing nurse,
and tell her I'll be her dandelion if she'll
let me borrow the gag and cuffs that dangle
from her purse
So we smooch and smile, and I comment on his lip gloss,
but after a while, neither one can figure out which one will be the boss.
Then I groove across the room, with the dopamine wicked grins,
and no one minds if I chainsmoke, yeah no one minds the sin.
Here, everyone talks like pain and pleasure are sort of like the same,
but folks here know that home has shame and love is why we came.
To adulturize and plagiarize our daily moral doings,
to kiss the cook, beat a husband and caudle our undoing.
Then Bird and I find ourselves a cuddle in a booth,
while the Don of Wolves sips merlot past his yellow snaggletooth.
Bird bites the gag to start our infamous scene, and we'll
be here 'till the whole place clears.
She loves in when I'm violent, but hates it when I'm mean.

3.
Girls aren't like apples
Yeah, the rotten ones fall
But a good woman's down to earth
See, that's why the metaphor doesn't
really quite work
Real Feminism ain't in wearing pants over skirts
'Twas about when I realized this that
me and her met
Maybe she let me be a little rough,
but she kissed me first.
She went off to work and I was
the one that waited
It was her desires that I sought and sated
Chivalry isn't dead because Don Quixote
never gave up
Chivalry's only resting, waiting for a
strong woman to pick it up
She wasn't my Dulcinea and I wasn't hers,
But the way some of those nights went
down, my sight, her sounds were angel whispers
It started on a freezing night in a KOA
Somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico
Both drunk, but we still talked the next day
And on and on, yeah, things really seemed to flow
Under a blanket, where we couldn't build a fire,
it was her hand
It reached for my leg.
If she were an apple at the top of a tree,
She'd have climbed on down, to be eaten by me.
Real modern femininity is about shirking
the bondage of old time passivity.
And I was a gentleman, she had work,
and I told her I'd wait.
We had so little time, it wasn't worth
it to fight
So I let her take when she wanted, whatever hour the night
And I loved her in California, where the curve of
My eyelash on her lip was the curve of my hand on her breast
And the curls of her snatch were the curls of my chest.
I chose to be the apple, rotten on the ground, and I guess
It wasn't sexy like that; she didn't want
to have to bend down
We were both so honest, but never really talked about "us"
We took things for granted, like this assumed kind of trust.
We both talked to strangers the same gentle way.
Accepting, but distant, which makes me wonder...
If it was the same thing with us;
Strangers but lovers, bonded by lust?
Yeah, she never put it in her mouth,
and I never gave her her first.
Looking back, the things I regret are the nights
we could have seen each other, but didn't.
I needed her in Utah, but I smashed
her delicate trust against the cunt of another
So Yeah, both stuck it to the other, but our roles were reversed.
So baby, if you're gonna step on me, take your heels off first.

4.
Anna's emptying out faces and faces and faces
Across pages and pages
Of fragments and half-empty spaces.
Billowy burbling bodies ballooning out
Of smoking clouds, framing hips, waist, breasts, and brawn.
Pieces of sinew and she's not painting with her own ganja green,
Percocet purple, or her "use me" yellow.
No, she's stealing the gold from a morning glory,
Borrowing orange from a sunset cloud,
and hijacking the ripe emerald from summer fields.
Blues liquiding, spilling against all of the lines she sketched,
Making something unintentional,
Violet and
Red violence and yet
All of these things she put to paper with
Her paint-stained fingers were once
Inside of her head.
Remembering Anna reminds me that
Morbid curiosity and throbbing lust are too often
Two eyes focused on the same point.
A person, a place, a target a
Thing.
"I want to get all up in there and see how it works!"
See, I guess I try not to paint pictures of things
That aren't whole in themselves,
Even if you only see half in the frame.
But Anna,
On the other hand
Smashes up bits of herself and let's them land
Where they'll land
With pieces of women, dancing the joy she didn't
all of these faces she drew
And none of them hers,
Where every moment with Anna is remembered
As a frustrated blur.
With open ears and arms and all of her railing sadness
I listened and consoled and shared poetry, pictures, and madness
Do you love me?
Do you really love me?
In front of the other art students.
struggling not to look at me and laugh
Her brown eyes severe, in a stymied glass.
With her sweat pants all hanging, green thong
Clung to her ass.
Red curls.
Red lips that dangle out begging phrases,
Struck from an oversexed trance.
I was so virginal, glad
Just to catch the ideas she draped out tongue heavy and sad.
And I remember Anna as the falling-off pieces of an icy mineral meteor,
Bombasting across the sky and melting, incinerating
Into dazzling shimmers, falling to the Earth
When I was the mercury added, at the final stage
To the crucible, horned and wing heeled, trying to turn lead
Into gold.
Only to be left hanging in the air, driving the Hatter Mad.
Together, we were genuine nonfictional satellites of fantasy
She painted all that happiness she never had.
Yeah, I cringe and love the way she smiles,
All beat down and thorny;
I can't lie, misery makes me pretty fucking horny.
See, Anna and I were only ever interested in pastelling, planning,
Pencilling, watercoloring or oiling and all of that toiling
On behalf of beings.
Our fingers made critters, not castles.
That is to say, beings in the sense that a rock sits, a tree grows, yeah
And a river's flowing.
But beings in the sense
Of Sensing, singing, running, taking, giving, and stowing.
Of being able to assert themselves.
Just maybe they don't.
Anna and I lived our lives like a train ride.
You can talk, or listen to the clatter track trance,
You can move to another car, you can even get up and dance,
But the destination's been set far,
Far in advance.
So, yeah, I saw Anna recently.
In a flat a block from Colorado Boulevard
And she's a bollywood skirted star with a soundtrack of the gas station, the big sign
The jack'n'the box and the cars, and the cars, and the cars.
I saw her room, all filth and empty cartons
I saw her hair, dreamy dreadlocked and nappy.
So I guess I got my revenge,
Cause I never got her and she never got happy.
Yeah, I don't know if Anna's still orbitting fiction
I never saw a return on my favors
And like me, shes probably still swimming in her contradiction,
Still looking for something honest to savor.

Tell me what you think

Wow, that's a lot to read.

Long time no see Guy . . . it's late, so I just read the first section (but I think it's best if I read one section a day, then re-read it all at once) . . .

Anywho, definately a fan of "Howl," I take it. And um, as such, while it is pretty good poetically (imagery, rhythm, tone, etc.) I almost wonder if it's a piece that really fits in our "modern times." Poetry has definately changed since the days of Ginsberg, and yet, it's kind of refreshing reading a piece that reflects on those days . . . honestly, your piece made me want to grab my Ginsberg collection.

I don't really have much to add or say, but I wonder, why write such a piece? (Again, I haven't read the whole thing)

Sorry, it's actually 4 unnamed pieces, so the one you read was whole. Ginsberg was definitely an influence on that piece. All of them are performance pieces that I use at poetry slams. Within that context, especially, I feel totally anachronistic, but whatever. I have to represent my influences.

Also, the way I read the parts that go "this a sign, this a sign" on stage, often turns into "this was supposed to be a sign, but is this a sign?" or "I heard this was a sign, this surely must be a sign!" or "is this a sign? could this be a sign?"

shrug.

I'm back . . .

I uh, skipped part 2 . . . sorry, it's just my personal hatred and self-applied-ignorance that I refuse to read poems with rhyme-schemes.

So on to part 3 . . . um, interesting. I liked the way it read . . . very, BAM! and in your face. I'm sure there's some kind of meter present, but the flow of the poem really helps it to keep on rolling. Um, I don't quite get the overall point of the poem, or why it's a poem, but I still enjoyed it nevertheless . . . but what was the symbolism of the apple? Also, I didn't like the last two lines . . . just kind of seemed thrown into the piece to help it give an ending. I almost think the line "her delicate trust against the cunt of another" would be a nice lil' ending. Overall, I liked the poem. Good flow, nice lines, and overall entertaining.

New One....

He has the strongest body I have ever held between my arms
toned by morning runs and alcoholci brawls with
meathead intellectuals
My brother is animated by guilt and shame.
He has rage that could topple capitalism, but he is Oedipus Rex
Not because of cigarette, baguette poetry
on the beaches on Malibu with our mother
but because he hates and could kill our father.
He bends halfway down when he screams, turning his body into
a cannon, Blasting caustic chemical missiles
that could only have become so hateful brewing in the guts of his self-doubt.
My Brother is the beer can, half-empty
and flung towards my face
on the streets of Brooklyn,
Because he wanted so sleep and he wanted comapny in the cab
and I wanted to kiss dawn.
My brother is the heaps of chronic,
the resin in his lungs that he can light with the flame called memory
and smoke his past.
And he does.
He is the depth of "I'm sorry,"
And his tears look like he needs
leeches more than tearducts, because
He has sweat it out, vomited it out
excorcised his agony with fists on my skin
My brother's tears aren't going to cut it.
He is the piles of unwashed clothes, half-eaten bowls of cereal
and the smell of his body without
showering, without even leaving his bed.
For days.
For weeks.
For months, my parents never knew
that we started talking, And I am proud that I corssed the bridge
Even using weed.
Even learning how to really drink.
Even learnign to cope with pain through violence,
through substances, to substitute feeling,
and through desperate exhaustion.
I am proud that I connected again with my brother.
Will he stand?
Will he spew up liquor or blood?
Will he beat me until I do, just to keep my smart mouth shut?
These are the questions I used to ask myself
on nights or afternoons spent with Edmund.
My brother is the three years, four years, six years
of prozac prescriptions, spottily filled, occasionally taken
And the shouting match encors to therapy sessions.
I wrote this next part in black pen, which tells me I am serious!
I want to get back to that particular crammed study session
that left me cyring, fearing fo failing and most of all
of missing Edmund
My brother. I look at him and in his ways, I see
fields of hops, hundreds of acres of
tobacco, potatoes, sugar cane, and highland coffee plantations.
It makes me think that the powerless starve because the powerful are unloved.
But our family worshipped him! He told jokes!
This is
This is more bitter than I want to be.
This is more weight than I want to put on my brother's shoulders
My thoughts are drifting away from the details, in spite of the black pen
I am high when I wrote this part. I am
My brother, crashing after a final.
Things were always tense before a move and
He is the boxes, a whole UHaul of books and pillows and bureaus and clothes
Two days from floor to truck
really, a matter of hours
between my parents, overworked, screamed-at and losing.
Veins. Redenning arms, redenning face. His light brown
eyes choked once again trying to flush himself of something toxic.
This is a face I saw too often.
Things are always tense before you are tested.
My brother is the night we moved to El Sereno from Altadena.
He sits there, spent from another bout, sputter drunk,
and I am brother, trying to be alone.

'nother...

I drank just one drink with Madam Elegance again, a few nights ago.
There she was, in lacy stockings and high heels, sipping wine at the bar.
Her dress, tastefully long,
with a slit up only one side, going halfway up that thigh.
Her hair, all done up in curls.
She floats through politic conversations,
generous with her time, but probably not for you or I,
Captivated, engaged, clever and demure,
cultured, just a little streetwise and never obscure.
Dancing, she never misses a step, and
"No thanks, I've had enough to drink."
She's never really too much of anything.
Her grace is so much that it blows the cover
on this meat market operation we call a club.
Next to her, every man is a troll
and every woman, an easy hag.
Watching the man at her table veil his lust
and the woman at her table veil her disgust,
I embodied both parties, fully sexual, fully violent, when I just said
"Fuck Her."
"Fuck who?" said the man, slightly older, next to me at the bar.
I pointed to Madam Elegance, "Her, over far."
"Why?" said the man.
I said, "I think I'd like to see every occasionally ogrish gent
and every tactfully low brow lady in the place
smash her with barstools,
crush that empty smile off her face.
Mop her through beer pools
and dump her in ashtrays.
The shame and loathing of us, the roaring, covorting crowd would be satiated.
Not by her flesh,
nor by her blood,
nor even by her bone,
but by ripping off Madam Elegance's delicate little affectations,
and finally seeing her naked, howling soul."
The man sighed, a bit disappointed.
"Boy, you got a lot of bad thoughts swimming round in that head"
I said, "Who needs your morals, old man? Haven't you heard? God is dead!"
"Listen," said the man, "I'd be lying to say I know you, I must confess,
but I can tell by your cut and the way that you dress,
that you try to be classy,
which means that you hate to be outclassed.
And since the competition is Madam Elegance, it's just something
You'll have to get passed."
I was stunned and shut up immediately.
He went on, saying
"Her image in your brain is an effigy you burn
to tell yourself that you don't care too much about appearances."
I had nothing more I could say.
So I left the joint and remembered what you said the other day,
about how much easier life gets
"When you imagine people not in their underwear,
but as cavemen, with all of the hair
they fight and shave.
Naked, pregnant, chewing marrow,
before we had all these costumes to perform dignity.
Before there was a straight, before there was a narrow."
You, you sing along when you don't know the words
you'll be damned if your shrillest voice isn't heard over a crowd
your mess of hair looks like the wind and the birds
you don't care what you're wearing, as long as you feel proud.
Not so blaring, you bring down the house,
just loud enough to bring every halfwit elephant's attention
to the wisecracking mouse.
You'd never be caught dead in a place like that.
And by the time my feet step up to the door,
I can all ready hear you, screaming and gory as the day you were born,
Every day is a reason to be too much of something,
and tonight, you were too rich with time,
so you've been wrapping yourself in too many stories,
the radio on, the crunch of the newspaper
as you put it down to open the door.
And you're wearing glasses because your eyes hurt from all those stories.
You've never been afraid to be too much.
And Madam Elegance is at the meat market,
waiting for someone who won't bore her.

1.
How the comic, erotic, anxious and unctuous faces so cling
to the mouths of the dancers
they samba and tango and swing
stolen poses between the rhythm of the ever draining seconds.
Dangled gainly under the outward diving tone of bass,
the upward pounding, unpopping bubbling of bongos,
singing saxophone and how the dancers,
their cheeks so crackled smiles.
The crinkled coolness of the faces, transfixed upon their whirled partners
unbeguiled by the future, their steps are taken so freely
so assured.
And even those who are stiffened by the chance of a misstep
and weakened by the eyes that hang loose for their partner
so rock into the summer dancefloor,
so drizzle their sweat down their legs.
And as their high heels and square-toes struck at the night,
pushing the red glow of human delight back further,
I almost wanted to weep, watching.
Not because of of some unstitched wound,
aimless lust for a partner.
But because I was watching these people become the sun.

2.
Sitting in Austin's airport's terminal, I am uncomfortably lonely.
More than being bored, I feel antsy, and I don't have the fiber
right now to start talking to a stranger, and I have melted down
burnt and vomitted up those fibers.
I can't even write this.
The page is daunting in its expectation of me.
My expectation of myself, of course.
Because it's something I've done before!
Sometimes, I feel like I am the bullshit my poetry
pulled out of its ass.
This whole trip was vibrant exuberance and scraping solitude
Empty, aching eyes like vaginas, out across the river to Austin's downtown.
4 am, then 5 am, then 5: 30, then finally 6.
There's not light enough in my room
there's never night enough in the city
for me to look through my hotel window and see my face in it.
Swimming in poetry and electrified by the energy of others
I am still the loneliness of heroin in the veins of William Burroughs
in Mexico City, 1945,
I am measured by the brief spaces between cigarettes
I am living for the free faces between shots.
My eyes are loose and sore when I wake up to an alarm,
a matter of hours later. fucked hard by another dream
I won't remember.
But mostly, I've been using my ears.
A lot of standing, sitting, waiting, prostrating, going over
lines and not listening.
Poetry was all over Austin, August, 2007.
I think at this moment, in the terminal,
I would have traded my vision, in all of its carnality and drive
all of its power to deceive, fancy or appaul,
if I could have a voice to always talk to,
and the ability to truly hear.