Improv: Bond's "Elegy"

This is a Mad Libs version of "Elegy." In the words of my grandfather, I done rurnt it.

Once I swore dying was the same light
from haste as sugar from peaches, the same
that plucked a pigeon's wing at night, a rostrum
I'd never clutch completely, I'd never hammer.

You know the feeling, I'm sure: the exhaust
that tends the refrain inside it, that keeps it overheard.

But if nerves are stemmed to a world in panic,
don't nerves too catch the flu. I want to believe

there is more truth in kennels of shins
than shins in any kennel that's truthful. But then

who could lose oneself inside a thigh
that never dies. One day our scaling turns

to calibrate the way a parable turns to its
remaining own womb. Is obstruction any less
the phantom, any less the preacher who compels
himself in the one he prays he won't

survive. One day a parable's elegy turns back
to say, don't I know you.

Improv: Bond's "Death Mask"

The hymnist irons his socks at night and calls me up,
tells me it's the end of the world, that I should move underground.
Last Sunday, during service, he flirted with Mrs. Dander
by the organ's pipes. I thought I saw him float up with the reeded air.
The hymnist has composed something not new but just new
enough, newer than the old and rugged and good and old;
he taps it out on the upright, a spatter of curious birds. I visit
with him in the fellowship hall, we clamber about
past the trays of micowaved, canned, corn creamed anythings,
he sweats through his suit, wipes down his face
with a used handkerchief--a theft--says I should take a good hard
look at which direction the grass grows, does it sprout up or lean,
should we follow and mask ourselves in a chorus, a verse,
an aria's fluttered peroration, in the signature the ground
forges across our faces' dotted lines.

Improv: Bond's "Homage to the Ear"

By the dim lamp in the corner, we stand witness to the ear without a body, something out of Blue Velvet or your father's formaldehyde cache. There's nothing but silence here. I think about your father and his ataxia. The way he holds his chest to the wall below that piece of Penley kitsch, like the way you examine the ear. Where did it come from? Who left it. It cries. We must keep it, hush it, whisper in sibilance, we will be happy I swear.

Improv: Bond's "Rock"

"Woody"
You who straps those cliched surfboards atop your skull, whose lost smoke echoes the loss of childhood, gum on the sole. You have no sense of wonder. And your name--chrissakes--an incantation unspoken here, in this crowd especially, who wears solid colors and eat bland, saltless foods. Okay, Surfin' USA, strap it on, rip it off, treetops, the swill of a wave like your spit in the toilet.

Improv: Bond's "A Diet of Angels"

So little to go on, the light heave of the zipper,
a disposition of flightless birds never so still,
sunken. She took me down the glazed

hill one morning, fumbling through sunflower
fields--a god's view. Somewhere is a word
between those words we throw like rocks

welling out of the hard ground. I fit
your glasses over the sunken hazel
and tell you we're visiting islands, any islands.

Improv: Bond's "Abyss of Birds"

What it must be to watch the callouses
fall from your fingertips. Drying dishes
in the key of C, keeping time with the waitresses's
tom, falling into your own monuments
or an angel's sword. It's a quartet you've
recorded years ago nobody's heard
that squeaks, squirms from the speakers
before you. Cerulean guitars
and coded words you can't even make
out now beckon to you like the angel
Gabriel--the mouthpiece of God.
Did he tell Lot's daughters to sleep
with him in that? Did he commission
the arson we committed that night
in your bedroom.

Improv: Bond "Body and Soul"

Where to find a good cup of coffee in the morning dark
where those old friends cook up little brown sausages
for their own sake, leaving you a stranger to the
ways the holes get it; the holes burrow between you
and the nameless hands before you and the place
you want to call home. Fall on your knees and tell
her you love her like a jazz drummer loves
a fake-book, without loving the mouthpiece,
emphesymic. The bridge and cough cling
to the oral roof like shingles. We are the rain.

Improv: Marks' "Dumb Luck"

My Ophelia with an itch sings, all the notes

a tad sharp, and wins. The line goes rifling
down into the carved rocks of southern KY,

the minefield we used to crawl through. When

the seasons change, we remove our clothes
but not all, and say people contain glory,

prose, all words living with us. But what
about the horse that won't rise,
what about his decayed meat? I have named
you, the horse, and your tomato. Dry me off

please.

Improv: Marks' "Bell"

I will not serenade you
with a chirr or the black bolt
of some distant bell, the falling
of the fifth string in that classroom.
You could ignore it all the way
to the bank in the morning. The scraps
of the evening and pancakes' clang
through your apartment slplit me
like your rust I can't help but shine
until nude, cavernous, holy.

Improv: Marks' "Semper Augustus"

Flakes and flashes of the same color, goes the entry,
and I can't help but think of you, the same age as me
but a different shade, darker in the evening fading us
into ourselves, into our own hues and shapes.

It is a beautiful flower, you say, though once
can hardly determine beauty of any sort;
no botanical garden (or other place we smoked

weed drunk) could ever exhibit its bloom

which now, in that light, accrues all that florin,
that demented coin and paper for its own
pocket, for you and your purse that sag
under your own weight. I, with an allegory,

set the record straight, and with a grin set
you into motion in my orbit, Andromeda
waltzing. We watch your movies and I spit
grains into my lunchbox for reminders.

Improv: Mark's "Lullaby"

I should be used to it by now, sleep that nails me to the door
in a heat even summer envies, all hair and sweat and sadness.
Throwing a deck of cards against the dingy wallpaper,
you can't help but caress something, a tuft of hair, a settled
settler, a body flung from a Volvo on a Friday night, a widow
of two. You want to sketch me, I oblige and ask
about your heart, she loves me she loves me not,
how it has failed you, can we drink espresso
in your chemo wig. your coldsweat logic.
I miss that. This lamp's heat puts me down.

Improv: Marks' "The Black Bear at Closing"

A figure to be reckoned with and a smell like getting used to the chickenhouse next door, she, the bear, takes the elevator to hell with you, and she puckers and wonders where you've been for so long, where the whiskey has gone, what you've done with Jesus down in the hole. The real fire, you say, has been smoldering and has finally extinguished. She, the bear, removes her garments, her fur and burn and love, and blasts you out with her hydraulic system. She's been hiding it this whole time, keeping you close to the Lord. His hands are so cold. Splayed by the numbers, the 1 through 13, you fall to your knees and say Amen, amen, amen.

Improv: Marks' "The Lake"

Deceptive, this calm, the way slow-toppling
waves bat our thighs, the way the mosquitoes'
wings pause on our shoulders as they proceed
with their nightly suck

of iron, the velvet-red swelling their bellies,
ours: empty. Where's your mother, father,
dementia-prone grandmother? Let us
plunge this johnboat into the lake

without their permission, flooding the foot
rests and our shoes that mingle with rotten
leaves in an admixture less than admirable,
let us stroke with a single paddle the depths

of this pond--though they call it a lake--
and we'll sink without effort in murk
and mire, those trite aquatic descriptors
since we're loaded on Jim Beam and whatever

we've got, let us be the shore, rather,
let the dock's benediction claim nothing
we own.

Improv: Marks' "House with a Bed of Tulips"

To the photo of her crow-haired father,
three years ago when he still took his own
shits, when neither you nor your forgetful mother
had to dress him, I said, keep it.

You must fill this album with things that don't exist,

it's in the contract, the wine's fine print,
the locked door and deal closing,

like your mother's yearbook photo with her braces,

brother, now dead, plunging his face into the night
air, chickenhouse teeth catching bugs. Your tulips
were never watered, I say, casting off the one
of your house before the flood. Your former husband
and you--or rather, more poignantly, the ex--
standing side by side before he blew
his brains out in the hospital parking lot,
sends the jolt of a cringe down my spine.

Improv: Marks' "The Poet's House"

Sits not on a foundation. Remember that city?
The one known for its lobster, for its annual parade
and 5K and not much else, the city tired of its hunt,
brushed away to the back pages of the poet's
biography, though it permeates his work:
the factories, the strip malls, that moment in the eighties
when the Rainbow Room spread wide its doors,
howled like San Fran in the rainy months,
the constant birdsong, the cough of winter.

Improv: Marks' "Hotel Fire"

Before we were led through the hotel's stairwell,
before you paused, telling me what you thought
of our neighbor's housecoat and pink slippers,
before that pregnancy test made itself known
to itself, to us, we lied pieced together
on those starched sheets in the steady,
open plastic of love. The alarm came
suddenly, imbuing thought into a thought
less tangible that we'd imagined. A cluster
of moments' explosions excised and examined,
Where would you like it, sir? hurried,
gasping, a breath like a dying leaf's. The fire
escapes' dull iron railing painted your fingertips
red, those flecks ironed into my wrinkled collar.
Where are you now, where.

Improv: Marks' "Three Bridges"

When the rains came I was spooning salt into a pie, the neighbors bleating
through the walls, the narrow, invisible cracks. I had to leave
it there--my mother's recipe--on the oven, away from the windowsill
where no steam would drift, where it would be beaten down or swatted
into the damp clay. I swear sometimes I hear a voice in the well.
The airhorn's distant movement sweeps us up, my daughter and
her cat, my husband and his Hagar, spits us like a plug
of tobacco into a silver cup. The voice in the well says that
the rain may never stop, and I am fine with my reflection there;
it must be what death is like, an attenuated hush, a roused silence.

Extra draft: Nondiagetic Prose Poem

In this terrible room in the light of this whorehouse lamp I am prying at a tooth, an incisor, half black on the back and set deeper in the mouth. Outside it is cold and fat kids on skateboards take the hill down to the apartment complex through the woods, and I shoo them like cattle on the way to the grocery story for processed cheese blocks--the food of all those cats on couches near OLympus, distinctly American--and on the road there, past the Tire Exxpress and the 12 for Life the tooth dances cricket-like. Songs on radio, no phone calls, a tracking device they pay me $25 a month for my data, my raw numbers, irreducible data reduced and compressed like the sub-100Hz through the subwoofer, but I grab the tooth that plunged through my lower hairless lip leaving a scarred straw hole when I pushed a skateboard in my parents' garage, listening to Dead Milkmen & Status Quo, a skater shooed into a box with a recessed incisor.

Draft: (Recursive) Homer Simpson Drinks

Homer Simpson drinks coffee alone.
Homer Simpson, parapatetic televisual father, sips blackness by himself.
The TV dad in cartoon Dayglo orange turns on his MR COFFEE and waits.
Wife and kids out the door, headed for traffic & traffic & school & school & work, Homer Simpson bends over the coffee machine bleary eyed, hungover, mouth a cotton white, hungry.
Homer Simpson doesn't need to drink coffee.

Draft: Soliloquy of the Pharmacy Technician

I'll prove to you I'm not a robot.
Under halogen lights persists
some furious sameness, like the
dust settled on the pillshelf's lowest
row, each speck spreading
from the other. I count by fives
the minutes of the day's minutes into
orange vials with SAF-T tops,
marching rat poison and anticonvulsives
five wide on a plastic tray,
confirming NDCs and UPCs and oxy
in a sea of little pills and pours.
The pharmacists are all women
with deadbeat or longgone husbands.
The women make the bread in their matching
scrubs. I'm sporting khakis and tie, a
technician. When they go home after shifts
when the sun's already down,
do their men eye them, their curves
slighted by the navy blue, the burgundy
hues? Do their husbands bat an eye
and have dinner ready? I go home to a duplex and close the door and lock it
quickly because I can't know my neighbors,
I count by fives the brussell sprouts and
sometimes, saying grace to myself, I'll tell
Jesus which pharmacy I work at and
how can I help him.

Draft: Bowdon Junction Fleamarket

Before the entrance with its plastic mesh in the threshold,
we duck and stomp through the dirt and quickrete
amid piles and piles of CRTs &VHS tapes & leather
belts branded on the spot, and an Asian behind the belt
booth reeks of cooking oil, smoking his tenth
handrolled cigarette by the ashtray's count. Morose and draped
women genuflect before wax Yankee Candle altars, begind
which I can imagine their Confederate flag, or the Bonnie Blue,
waving as it did before Sherman burned it all. We
eat chili dogs with Heinz & relish & sauerkraut
and drink flasked liquor from styrofoam cups,
a sea of people and gastric scents from both the kitchen
and imported, the cringe of hay and workboots & red clay,
moving without ceasing.

Junkyard Quotes 10-20

"I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right." - George W. Bush
"I'm about to lose my dignity on a slippery weiner." - Brittany, Big Brother
"I think I've acquired a drinking problem. It's ok, though, I only have to work three days this week." - some girl, just now.
"She put everything she had, all 120 lbs and 40 tattoos, behind it."  - James, Big Brother
"I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved." -Chris Christie
"I will speak until I can no longer speak." - Rand Paul
"I am only fit for the fairy folk." - Lucas Chance
"Ultimately, it's just a tool, like a fancy socket wrench." - Jesse Bishop
"A fun night, until you hear two pairs of running feet, and a girl screaming bloody murder for a guy to get off her." - Ben Bolton
"Tyler, Tyler, Tyler, quit being yourself and be someone better." - Walter Ingram
"She is noted to be chewing on the vertebrae of a large mammal." - Deb Guffey
"Man gets sucked into sinkholes." - The news

Junkyard Quotes 1-9

“White, white bread for white, white people.” -Tom Servo, MST3k

‘Cover me, when I run” -Peter Gabriel “Shock the Monkey”

“That gum you like is about to come back in style.” -The Man from a Strange place Twin Peaks

“What do you think to John Wayne’s wig after he died?” -Lucas Chance, just now.

“Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens when you find a stranger in the alps? This is what happens, Larry! This is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs!” -The TV edit of The Big Lebowski 

“I…can’t…reach…my beer…” -Sean Jepson

“You’ve been spreading lies that I was untrue

(Hey-now, hey-now. My boyfriend’s back.)

So look out now ‘cause he’s coming after you

(hey-now, hey-now. My boyfriend’s back)” -The Angels “My Boyfriend’s back.”

“He hit me

And it felt a kiss

He hit me

But it didn’t hurt me” -The Crystals “He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss)”

“Balls deep from Samantha from Bewitched.” -Logan, my roommate

“What am I? Am I chopped liver?” --Lucas

Improv: Heather McHugh “Language Lesson 1976”

Canton, OH is the cradle of professional football.

The grave is unmarked today. Baseball has had its plot brought for years looking

Churchward in the prewar cordoned off section.

All the thistles bristling as my father and I make tracings. Something to do one Saturday afternoon

When Sunday wants to expand the afflicted suburb.

Improv: Robert Hayden “Those Winter Sundays”

My father used to keep a full beard in his beer swilling days
back when beards were passe and now he talks about
the Mojave and a layer of dried impacted, fossilized, plankton
blown by heavy winds into the rainforest for fertilizer
and he says its the hand of God. How could it not be?
H strokes his goatee, close cropped, expectant.

Improv: Marie Howe “Sixth Grade”

Paw stopped smoking cigars after he returned from death valley boot camp.

He couldn’t stand the sordid, soggy smell of dried tobacco wrapped in paper

With a golden ring ‘round it, matching the one he made for my Maw from a

Liberty Eagle coin in shop class in February in 1960-something. She was fourteen

And he was having his head shaved bald and it would never grow back.

Did he smoke one after my uncle and father were born?

Improv: William Matthews “Loyal.”

“My baby does the hanky panky.”

If I lived forever, I would surround

Myself in 60s bubblegum popping records snapping vinyl.

I would eat two tons of nacho cheese. Then become sad and lonely

In a hill top box surrounded by knotty pines and corrugated

Steel and making up songs to sell and slander

In my head.

Improv: Tony Hoagland “America”

America, Hell yes!

Place where corn grows longer and taller than shit on the farm my Dad owns where that Old Johnson grows with his unibrowed, cross-eyed mountain children, carrying half-broken dolls in paisley dresses too short to be shirts and tractors greener and newer than the one their hick daddy drives.

America, yes.

I love it here where any man can grow tall and bear fruit even under the boot of a rich man with too much time on his hands and feet. I get most of my stuff at the Pig at the end of the month when my check comes.

Improv: Rodney Jones ‘A Defense of Poetry”

She speaks in abstract quoted philosophy

And governs by committee the

Lost self, semitraded six-shooter of ideas and babble a river of dead moles.

She has no patience for poetry

Or the way I rest my head on her tall stomach while we watch.

Black chandelle where the water was slows your brain as she touched my head.

Chinaberry tree.

Improv: WS Merwin "The River of Bees"

I bridged the orange mills fifteen years
ago, a blind man looking on. The singing
goats fell into the rooms and beehives
where I took my eyes after the bottle emptied
images of mouths chewing forkfuls of bees,
we are the reverberation set to bucket-brigade
in a soft room with a
dime-store guitar asking how it will end for
me.
Once once and once she sang of goats and milksop
and burnweed, litigious in her calls. She thinks she
is better than water. I have fallen into my blisters. The
yoke hope proffers is as short as the grass
in the city where I was born. They keep it well
trimmed, only to live.

Improv: Gary Soto "Mission Tire Factory 1969"

All through lunch Peter only managed three dollars
for Jesus squinting from his rubber lungs--poor guy can't breathe--
and the wash of the machine in the workshed where we managed to
find the sandwich he wanted was outdone only by his wallet and his Roth IRA
Peter doubted he could swing a reuben for saving
Manny's life earlier in the day, while the buck sixty five crawled
through some portico on a steamtrain bound to those rubber plants and steelmills in Birmingham and West VA, where it would eventually melt down into a pin to keep a severed arm attached, gory, flappping like a loose winged pheasant or bookends of sandwich bread.

Improv: Li-Young Lee “Eating Alone”

Once a year is back I clocked into a work whole audit continued.

My father was waving in between the trees with an open hand.

I’m at a man camp in North Dakota with the smell of oil on steel slashed hands

And the warm feeling I have from the pills I bought from Wally on that school bus

Between the empty lot and the tent where they have the women plastered on walls.

Improv: Philip Larkin “High Windows”

When I see a couple of kids

On a Friday night in my hometown

I become envious of that feeling I had when I had a scrape on my knee

Or saw the inside of a woman’s thigh for the first time and was astounded and frightened and that feeling would pass like an older man in the night.

Improv: Stephen Graham Jones “Green Pants”

Jeep grand Cherokee in the Tennessee winter and scared shit out of my mind with that feeling of dread you get that only occurs when you see a girl you knew once or have a rock in your shoe.

Improv: Yusef Komunyakaa “My Father’s Love Letters”

On Fridays he’d be redeemed by a can of Jax after closing his eyes or balling his blackened and broken fists with my mother who never made the swelling go down. They would become roses of hands and his ballpoint pen in his pocket that he used to write orders on blue-lined paper on legal pads and measurements on pieces of yellowed wood used for houses and decks. He’d suck splinters out of his fingers and tell me how to come up in the world.

Improv: Anthony Hecht “The End of the Weekend”

A dying quirt of a cowboy leans against

The bookstack, laid at skin taut and paging

The Captain. We whip together to the dead

Wails in trees that have sinned and where

Do I feel her nails, her formless prayers told in tongs and tongues I don’t understand or can stand?

The eventual cabin of her loose and store brand underthings frill-less and frivolous

Awaits. The noise grates me against

The attic beam. I climb the moonlight

To a where a magnesium strip of

Fur congeals against the headstones

Of the dead.

Improv: Seamus Heaney “Digging”

Between the gun and the thumb rest

I imagine there’s a slit window and a rasping wind

Where a spade spread us part like my father

And his dirt.

The straining flower beads twenty years away

Boot against those tomatoes the red dirt

Where he buried himself and his dirt.

The lug knee lowered the brought edge deep

Into a cantilevered root parallel to some

Inexhaustible hardness like coal or dirt

And the clay by Indian Creek near

Hillcrest was never harsh-wet or

Everyone would but a contract had been arranged by my father

For his dirt.

Improv: Albert Goldbarth “27,000 Miles”

Asleep and indrawn, the string paper

Coughs up enough pity to conquer

The air like some Arctic Tern that

Packages its body in a capricious

Toy thing. Make that an egret.

Make that my brother, who is me,

We both eat miles of road, not

Much sky, but the same applies.

Simultaneous strength, escape a caprice

A Chevy caprice with a duct taped

Bumper on the road to fernbank

And it feels like 2700 miles to see

Those angry wings flip-flapping

In the opposite direction.

Improv: Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

America I’ve given you my poems

And angels when will you

Be my other? I don’t feel

Like fucking with your settings

Red white and blue box

On top of my tv and a cracked

Magnet strapon my Bank of You

Debit debt card. I can’t stand my own mind

America after you’ve still

Got your footprint all over the

Middle East and Mid West and soon they’ll be

Fossilized like a seasick sasquatch.

You made me want a little

Debbie. I would marry and make with her.

I refuse to stop pushing pills

And I will hang you by a jury of perilous peers

America you are my dead drunk uncle and I think of you

On warm nights when the air conditioner stops and the wife beater sticks

Tight to the skin like a drum or leather on a two ton heifer.

I won’t say my two-penny Baptist prayers or take my

More baths in their fonts.

America I read People magazine in dentist offices with the smell sweet and sterile

With the smile of the hygienist as she asks me where I got my shoes.

I tell her they’re imported.

America I am talking to myself and am becoming bored with the lack of conversation.

I feel how Eric Robert Rudolph felt

There were no reindeer games

Phil Spector singing Da doo run run while he held

His revolver making Leonard Cohen sing about

Boners, naked women, and iodine.

Burn down Guantanomo

Turn it into a Disney  world. Castro cotton candy

And Che Guevera with mouse ears and a laugh that makes children cry when comes too close.

Make it sure he’s a blockbuster of a sequel, better than the first,

Sell your atheletes and your crosses and that cold, dry

Empty feeling I have whenever I turn on my tv and hear the cathode ray hum louder than the pledge of allegiance.

Improv: Derek Walcott’s “Blues”

Those five or six young guys
I’m seeing down beneath Central Park
singing a standard I’ve forgotten
and beating their dry drums until they’re
tuneless—I hate them. Not because they’re
foreign or lonesome or high.
I have  a sneaking suspicion they wouldn’t
let me in, join in their sick geodesy,
eating their suitan.

Improv: Lyn Hejinian’s “Elegy”

Imagine this body as it rests upon a rustflake.
Imagine nothing,
the image of a body upon a rustflake.
Imagine the imagination
Imagine the imagination.
I have no imagination but with pen in hand
yet obsessive imagination and mind pictures,
they pour into buckets and crank engines,
cantilevers of faith peer sidelong at a glance
What do you do with your free time,
I find time to be effortless and free
and when I call you you call me
where the knuckle-boned trees rest easy
upon rustflakes and Canaan speaks
in vile tongues a black mass for the imagination.

Improv: Philip Levine’s “Growth”

When my mother retired from the soap factory
she was floor manager and was about to pull her
hair out. She would come home after the whistle
you could hear all over town and iron, slowly,
lilting the machine over the board, something
like meditation. She rarely spoke about work,
and I enjoyed that. I cooked the meals by the grease-
spattered stove: some pasta, some chicken, some
potatoes. The day my mother retired from the soap
factory, they shut it down. The day my mother retired
from the soap factory, the last infantryman left Iraq.
The day my mother retired from the soap factory,
she had no money to live on. The day my mother
retired from the soap factory, I knew I would have
to get a better job. To eventually send her to a home.
To take care of her taxes.

Improv: Pimone Triplett’s “Comings and Goings, Bangkok”

Once, in a house I will inherit in a land I can’t explain

I heard a viceless woman speak like whippoorwills
about her eternal home,
not the sagging, slanted thing around us—I was
trying to sell her storm windows and she’d have
none of that—but instead a home in heaven,
with a veranda and colonnade and lemonade
pouring from gilded spigots. Her eyes, red
from dust and loneliness, reminded me
of those few days I spent with a woman
by the Gulf of Mexico, and the ember of the sun
burning off over the sea there. The old woman
in the slanted house didn’t buy what I was selling,
at least at the time.

Improv: BH Fairchild "Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967"

My brother and I hop into the cab of a
'66 Ford, one of about a hundred fingering out
into my grandparents' yard, and
we take turns shifting gears, animating the rusted halls
with our mouths, lips pursed, burbling. Gangs
of crazed locusts spill from the exhaust, nevermind
the fucked manifold. Across the river
we spy a woman and  child
sneaking down through the thistles and weeds,
loaded and loading into that infinite suck.

Improv: CK Williams "Neglect"

The african violets on the table, an inuslin bag and half full water glasses before people I don't know, htose half relatives gripping their yough they pass around clockwise in grins, the Buick dealer, smiling. They're playing mommy, auntie, doing the whole thing up in this grayframe building, trying to figure out arrangements. It's like we're all still kids at Maw Maw's house gathered around a plastic table eating dressing--no turkey 'cause we're picky like weeks old scabs of old snow--but with attachments. WE want the half-fenced yards and astroturfs and fraying fringes of a Mary Kay town.

Improv: Sherman Alexie "The Powwow at the End of the World"

And there's this version of American history we'd like
to forget but we can't . It's a growth in the stomach,
enamel burnt and corroding along this path
lined with dams, Grand Coulee, Hoover, Eerie, Panama,
Sweeping through Kansas like a drunk tumbleweed,
Faircloth Lake Dam where my grandfather fished
for crappie with my mother when she was as old as she
was in this picture of her, cherokee blood thinned
to some unnamable percentage, not even enough to
qualify a trip upstream to the end of the world.

Improv: Louise Bogan "A Tale"

This youth too long has heard the break
of the measure where the rest note lurks,
it hides, silent, seeking to wake
him from the purely rote earplay he knows works.
But the woman at bench creaks and is she disapproving is she in ecstasy? Her break
cuts the tepid air in this attic, she believes the best
practice pmakes every good boy meek.

Improv: Elizabeth Alexander "Haircut"

I get off the Night Bus on Oglethorpe next to the Bait Shop where the cops park and sip their scalding coffee beneath a street lamp to wait for some kid like me to stumble into their purview like a deer from a boxblind, just grazing and willing to answer their questions. The Night Bus giets me there, but only slowly. The coked up Mansons  in back had reeked of Pall Malls and cat, I'm afraid that's what I'll smell like.

Improv: Toi Decotte "In Knowledge of Young Boys"

In Knowledge of Young Girls
I knew you as my mother before I wrote
your name all over my little rocking chair
in felt pen. I knew you while I watched Eraserhead
the first time, with you of course, you were
yawning by the time Henry became titular
and significant. I knew you by your awful couch
with the dog hairs troubling sinuses and making
that nicotine patch more troublesome. I knew you
with your hair parted in the middle.
I knew you where the terrible eye in the center
of my head formed a sad contract and
gave you the howling fantods, which is what we
were at trivia night at 302 South St, providing answers
to questions brave with memory.

Improv: Leroi Jones "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"

Each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
I can't remember the last time we swam together
like terrible fish in a shit-flecked aquarium.
I had brought you an old vine zin for Christmas so
I bought some today and murdered the bottle,
knowing I would enjoy the idea.
Where have all the clowns gone>
I've tried praying but
I feel like God laughs at my jokes.
Sometimes a train's horn sounds off downtown.
Sometimes it doesn't.

Improv: Kevin Young "Ode to Boudin"

You are the chewing gum of God. Your
skin holds more than it meets. The heart
of you is a fool like me, broken, way out
in this owrld where most things disappear.
You are ground already and drunk, hafl-brother.
The homemade day flowers white as remembrance
root and spill like music. Daddy grieves
and aunts dance in the yard, lowering him
into the ground.

Improv: May Swenson "Strawberrying"

Rough-veined and ripe to bursting flesh,
his peck in some juicy cheek at first
blush. Fingers rumple and gorge, sweet
hearts young and firm, barefoot.
June was for decay. Take only the mother
and don't step on any until you wake up
in the morning feeling like P Diddy, fruit in
clusters and rich scarlets, aphid mouths.
Ravish me. Ripeness aches to be stripped.
It burns the backs of our necks and they bleed
so let them rot in the heat.

Improv: Thylias Moss "Tornados"

I envy them. They dance.
I jitterbug and shuttle. My legs are
strong as time, justice. The conductor
of electricity, hair on end, strings release
the ions and Beethoven, and ofcourse I listen
to this nightly. The movement swarms before I
saw my first surrogate that morning, someone
to occupy my space. That black baptism guards
all the words, looking over Jordan
with a brand new body.

Improv: Mark Strand "Man and Camel"

On my thirtieth birthday
I sit on the porch having a smoke and
playing gangster rap. The suburbs are quiet,
kids in cul-de-sacs, lonesome windows glaring vacancy
across the street tidy as windblown sand. Was this
the image I had waited for so long? A desert voice calls,
an uncommon coupling, a rock formation
vanishing as it gallops its slow gallop.

Improv: Robert Pinsky "The Shirt"

Sewell's Mill in 1984, my mother enters the office
where her mother's friends work. All of them know
her and smile through their smoky
truth, talking money and politics. My mother
is not interested in this; she plows toward
the mangled, needle-ridden employment office
whose non-union infamy makes this place a
sweat shop under God and Reagan, indivisible,
unlike the lapped seams and bar-tacked corners of pockets
bundled in twine. She hands in her application, only
after every option has been extinguished.
There was athe sock-shop husband in the hospital
parking lot with a thirty eight and wetness,
warmth on the windshield, cracked safety glass
behind. She holds her own space in the office,
steps before a windowsill and blows the dead man
a kiss.

Improv: Larry Levis "The Poet at Seventeen"

My youth? I smell it in boiled okra and shelled peas, five gallon
buckets of husks where the invisible bugs crawled. On a
baseball field midspring where I would heave
asthmatically and work on my knuckler. The trees breathed
and sang lost songs that I would forget during recess, with
groups of laughing tractor boys. The widows, bored of poems,
noticed the birds that flew in front of me then.
They inflected and bore me their okra and vittles
and, I admit it, I was happy.

Improv: Gwendolyn Brooks "The Rites for Cousin Vit"

Carried her happiness in hysterics.
Kicked the casket to the alley, on the verge
of holding her. That stuff of pregnancy and
contrition with the boltwork guitars--it's too
much. Surmise a slop of bad wine and hiss
like an egg in sunshine.
Go back to the bars she knew and must emerge.
The squeaking love-room's
repose talks of snake-hips and is,
and is, and is.

Improv: Audre Lorde "Power"

The difference between fixation and contentment
is being ready to ablate
yourself
instead of yourself.
I am a gunshot and a dead black face and shoulders for miles,
the only liquid spits onto dry lips without
reason, his blood, the whiteness of
lost magic. How does one make power
of hatred? With kisses, bones
in Queens the boy with his cop shoes
said there are tapes to prove that
this defense didn't size up his color.
That police-forcing white man
satisfied the one black woman who meant to drag his frame over
hot coals until she lined her womb with cement.

Improv: Camille T Dungy "The Preachers Eat Out"

There were maybe four of them, perhaps five.
They were headed downtown, to Adamson
Square where the textile mill's shadow
looms large. They were hungry but not really. Their
tight suits cramped them but they stopped at the Waffle
House where Ida was tapping on a beat-up telegraph,
breaking plates out back.

Improv: Ilya Kaminsky "We Lived Happily During the War"

When they opposed other people's bombs,
we fell invisibly in disaster. I sunned in a chair
rubbing money into my poors, a country of war,
trucks that rumble like total war. In my bed
that nobody shares there's a divot for a corpse
made of money, irreparable and droll:
the falling never fell around America. We lived
happily Prozac dreams and total war.

Improv: Brigit Pegeen Kelly "The Dragon"

The bees came out of the melons and deer's breast.
We shovelled compost with bright light and wet black.
A snake necked slowly through the garden, dragging
some child king with ghostly hands, oiled by juiced.
A winged, dead air sifted around me, past the dead
roses and broken fruit, sleeping plinth ungodly and turning.
Executed beauty, where do you stay after the fires?
Before storms? I keep thinking the shapes will settle.

Improv: Aimee Nez "Canticle with Sea Worm"

Blessed be the curly haired plants
who crisp me into an angry sea
trenched with wedding rings.
Blessed be the Brazilian children
studying thanklessly their juice and
raspberry vodka, before the
lady with the plastic bags like china dolls,
a fifty foot woman made of neon and
condensed milk. I pulled her postcard where
worms mouthed bits of t-shirts, little
eunuchs. I offer her coffee--bless it--
and she tells me, wearing gnat-stained sandals,
about the day the Lord has made.

Improv: Natasha Tretheway "Blond"

Certainly it was the recessive traits that attached my earlobes
to my eyes, my good tan wasted on skin grafts.
I could have passed for white on Christmas Day with Bing Crosby,
wearing a pink sequined tutu--Mom says I'm not
supposed to--but not that it mattered,
mother nestling the baby brother I never wanted
in his creche and he's nearly as tall as me, with
a whirl of photographs and miraculous births prances by
night like my father in his dress
rolling dices for the long odds.

Improv: Alice Notley "I the People"

I make love to we but & the things created winter &
the repetitions trees in the gell'd
neighborhood holding the musical
notes of silken pre-dawn heaven
& hold we and I in a dawn
caress & we are numbers & gold
medals in stereo 5.1 surround
& everyone and opening once the gold&silver
where the
X once marked X once marked.

Improv: Jack Gilbert "In Dispraise of Poetry"

Jacob dreams of white elephants
and courtiers for some bleached
madame and he tells me this
in the Jack's bathroom, the stall
shut, his arm propped above the
sink, gazing into his own eyes.

Improv: Robert Creeley "The Rain"

All night the persistent tiredness
fell on the roof with hopeless insistence again,
quietly.
What am I remembered
for when it insists upon
it so often? Is it
the hardness of love,
the locked uneasiness
of a love lying next to me
like rain beating tired
of a wet frantic indifference.

Riffing on James Tate's "Goodtime Jesus"

Jesus the absentee father mopes the dirty streets in rags. He looks for work down by the Sea of Galilee but only hears of fishing jobs. His kid's belly swells every day and it's a wonder there aren't flies around the eyes.  You've heard he hitched a Mary, like his mother. Oedipus, much. I heard he's a wino. Who knows. He should get into catering. My boy Jephat can cook up a loaf-n-fish that tastes just like heaven.

Draft 4: Something Traumatic from Childhood

If you must know, I've never had a 'traumatic experience,' sir,
not me, not younger me. I have lucked out.
But now that you mention it, since we're both sitting here,
your office that reeks of burley's thin tar,
this reminds me (you said it was fine to ramble)
of my great-grandfather's Prince Albert cans
and his locked knee. When he slept, he kept
it perpendicular to the bed, jutting ceiling-ward
outside the sheets. Now, when you ask me to share,
I'll share, but please let me continue. These cars
seem too loud and close through the open window.
And he would snore, I tell you,
and hack up fluid at all hours, especially after
plowing the garden with the tractor. It now belongs
to my father. Great-grandfather's knee would swell
beneath his overalls. He would strip down to longjohns
and prop the useless thing by the woodstove and smoke
his Prince Albert, and I almost believed he was the man on the label
with the handlebar moustaches, some Houdini in denim
who hung up his hat along with his dogtags.
And then like magic we had him buried in churchyard
where he'd never went and prayed real hard
for his soul because mother told me to.
A few people cried, but I wasn't one.
How they got the leg to lie down in that box
I'll never know.

Draft 5: Interview Exercise

The clown kicks a good sturdy pair of Converses
near the pink-haired girl, a good, sturdy
pair clamped to the concrete like a grandaddy longlegs.
She recites lines from Stevens' 'Thirteen Ways'
in line to get the stitches removed. Jay Lynn
tells her there are thirteen ways to jump from a building
and the brother beside jogs his leg, doglike
to a song that never ends.
She chews sugar.
Warm vanilla cut with ozone; the lobby
smell. Nine, twenty two, eighteen, and her,
cruise tickets crumpled in a canvas purse where a black widow,
dead, cannot weave.
She's named after the pop singer.
There's a sign above her head in big bright neon
flashing I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU and
a champagne flute snapping in syncopated time.
They will excise the stitches with cereal
and little spiders, a million of them.
She pats her kid sister's head and the kid says
it will be all right, do not worry,
little sayings the computer programmer kept on the fridge
where he kept cured meats and sauces.
Neon purple, the kind that glows in alleys in movies
with illicit intent. The doctor will see her now, the fat nurse
says, features masked like the clown.

Riffing on Claude McKay's "The Harlem Dancer"

She drinks the cold coffee chased with water
and stares into her hand, convincing it to calm.
A drunk trombone wheezes like her father
walking up a flight of stairs at dawn.
She sang and danced wearing an urgent shirt
and hole-riddled jeans and Bobby ordered
another gin drink, one part booze one part balls to flirt
with her through the smoke-bordered
bar. Neither had a loaded gun
or American flag decal slapped on their foreheads
but you could tell whose soldier-story won
their expressions instead.

Riffing on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

Through the motel walls I hear the accreted sex of years,
of mothers and fathers on lunch break, loaded soccer players
after practice. It winds like a golden current and wraps around itself
like ivy. It hisses, thuds. It slams into the alarm clock and tells me
to get up, Alfred, get up, hurry up it's time.
Wendy--the waitress across the street in Lafiglia--cooks up
a mean St Louis BBQ. I am sure she has never mouthed those
thimbles.

Riffing on Wendell Berry's "The Vacation"

Once there was a man who worked the graveyard shift.
His days were really nights and vice versa. In the day
he'd sweat out whiskey from the drawn-curtain evenings
and it would pool in his armpits like unanswered
questions. He lived by a river that had dried
the previous summer and all the cranes had fled en masse.
He worked to pay the rent on this house by the river
that was close to his job. Once, he stepped into the river bed
under the noon Georgia sun that hits like an ACME anvil
one evening and wedged his hairy toes into the clay and did
not miss the water.

Junkyard Quotes 11-20

"a song that could be wailed well" --Wally
"German hellos"- Dr. D
"all across the stacked United States of woe"-- A song playing from a passing Jeep.
"every song turned out to be a prophecy, didn't it?" --Whitney, a friend, commenting on some of my shitty, sappy songs that you can find at www.reverbnation.com/tylerkeystrangers (NB: these are just as bad as the poetry.)
"better the devil you know"--Grandmother King
"to piss outdoors is the last free thing in this world" --Logan
"heels of the bread" --Amy
"To Doug, / Toughly, I hope ye may thole." --Inscription in my copy of a James Joyce book
"the daily violence of the strong overcoming the weak" -- a reporter in the cult snuff-film Cannibal Holocaust
"It's basically pornography that appeals to anger instead of lust"-- EH on Glen Beck
"Sometimes we throw rocks when we orta be lookin' at a mirror" Dr. Padgett

Riffing on Bhatt's "What Is Worth Knowing?"

It is worth knowing that Mr Wrestling's real name
was Don Felder, and he was not an Eagle.
That Jimmy the Greek was actually Sicillian
and Andre the Giant was hydrocephalic at birth.
That drool from certain dreams tends to cause
more dreams when ingested later. That
if Jesus lived today he'd be shot up by the
ATF and have his person ripped into bagged cheese,
not to mention they would plant a dime on him.
That Hank Williams once played a gig
in the world's smallest town.
The town was mine, and my grandfather
was there, the only man in attendance.
The women wanted him for communion.
That Paris, KY is not the same as Paris, FR,
but someone built a little Eiffel erected in the town square.
That you can climb this tower and vomit
from the peak without going to jail. That every time
my friends and I play trivia we lose
to a bunch of townies who work at the paper mill.
That there must be something written on that
paper.

Riffing on Lowell's "Father's Bedroom"

A wrinkled stars-n-bars tacked
to the wall, a pearloid patterned
waiting-room chair,
a La-Z-Boy designed for two,
A recycled corporate desk,
above it, Sean Connery as Bond,
framed with a Walther PPK,
an NRA calendar left on last month,
every award earned or received,
one two three four
and four more diplomas of
welding and history,
my Marshall stack and foreign piano,
his thriftstore guitar made of resin
like this room.

Riffing on Joy Harjo's "Climbing the Streets of Worcester, Mass."

All the pigeon-gray houses have closed their eyes
for beddy-bye and there's a man wearing Glad bags
on the corner waving a busted hockey stick like he's
just won the Whatever Cup. Mother tells me
to get in the door and not to look him in the eye--
you'll die, you'll die--
so I reach the door handle and hold on for
dear life. Mother has been making pennies
for my piggy bank all day,
her cracked knuckles struck all those little
coins and put the faces and buildings
on them, and there they go in the bank, which
is not a pig but a hock of ham advertising for Jones
BBQ. Mother says that the bag man needs pennies
but never to give him one. He'll want them all, sweet
boy. And the train runs and rattles the clown statuettes
on the cabinet, wind pouring in the windows.

Riffing on Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died"

So she had on a blue silk dress that I never liked and I wore some vest from a secondhand store and the steakhouse downtown had dollar PBRs so of course, cheers, we swigged them down with some Marlboros and jaywalked over to Plates which is by all means the most fraternal of all the bars if you know what I mean and the bartender with the lowcut shirt and the tits gave me a wink and made her drink double stout than mine and I tipped her five bucks for the trouble but after a few of those the scenery became stale so on the balcony she met a friend or two or three, I can't recall, and bet them she wouldn't jump off the balcony and of course she lost. She's so good at that. More jaywalking, it is now Sunday, things will shut down, flicker, and down on Lovvorn there's a shindig in Mandeville with a banjo or two and we'll sing My Darling Clementine like it's 1999 and we'll do what we do until the moon fades and I can't think straight. Where do we do these things where

Riffing on David Bottoms' "Shooting Rats..."

In the Hardee's parking lot, we eat
those storebought biscuits, imitations
of Grandma's cat-heads, and later we're still
there, after school lets out, throwing beer cans
in the dumpster.

Jimmy Klein hits a skater with a busted
bottle and revs his engine. We howl
like indians. When Deputy Randall taps
on Jimmy's window, hand on the bloody
kid's back, Jimmy says, 'Sorry.'

We're never as sorry as you make us.
We have the prettiest cheerleaders bent
over in passenger seats. Their hair
drapes what they do. And they offer.
Sometimes when it gets too late
and we call our older brothers to pick us
up, knowing like an almanac when they will
be willing, sometimes the football field
over on Briarview looks like a backlit crown
of thorns.

Riffing on Jehanne Dubrow's "Nonessential Equipment"

(I just copped most of Dubrow's verbs for this one.)

You say, sometimes in bed, that we are poor.
We can't be. I forget the smell of potted meat
that brings saltines from box to mouth.
I we my feet in the kiddie pool,
beside the hosey meat the cat needs.
It gives me the heebie jeebies.
You can't be bothered while your hands pick
apart the entrails of your father's Ford pickup.
You can't be bothered most days. The engine
must weigh as much as space.
I've emptied the cupboards of the corporated
meat, and the holsters packing heat
that we most certainly can't afford.

Riffing on Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg"

Jimmy Three-Foot came up from the mine shaft
with black teeth and a fifty dollar bill. He found it
wedged between a busted Mag Lite and the mine
wall. His aunt used to live down the street. When
she made pies, sweet steam rolled out of her
windows. A bird would tweet sometimes, with
a voice like a shape-note singer's.
The sewing plant shut down,
rows of clothiers turned pawns, EZ PAY TODAY,
black tarmac walks cracking in the grease heat.
Magnesium is bleak where you mine it but bright
where you light it. Jimmy's ma used to bounce shop
to shop with shoes that clacked like castanets.

Riffing on Forche's "The Colonel"

The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,
above our city that reeks of shit at 1:12 AM,
a chill raising little skin pips on the fellow
wearing only blankets beside the Goodwill.
Driving at night without headlights is possible only
because of the sheer number of street lamps,
those flickering, indolent antennae sprouting
from busted concrete, and of course you take
advantage, one hand jutting into the cold
with its middle finger parallel with the lamps,
eating shit with that grin. I have
wanted to capture you in little coal grids,
only when you grin like this. I think
it would scare the children by the gallery,
preschoolers whose parents would object
to the gallery's location, but it's far too cold
and dark now to matter.

Riffing on "Respect, 1967" by Ai.

The porchlight isn't even on
when I come home, ready to fight.
My wife has it coming, or has been,
all over some weasely cracker from down
the street with his NAPA hat backwards,
who changed her oil last week. She payed
with a wink and told him I work at the wire
plant, that I hit the third shift next week.
Junior's door cracks. His fat fingers clutch
the molding, don't move 'til I walk past
and tell him to go the hell to sleep.
I remember the sound of trains
running when I was asleep and Mama's
goiter while a man is not kneeling for whores
she combed her hair before the bathroom
vanity. Her throat was pregnant and
I wondered who the daddy could be.
And Milk and eggs and Tampax
and all the messy stuff that is female she keeps
locked away in boxes, while this NAPA hat
does rings around the bedpost, recursive.

Riffing/iffing on Charles Wright's "Clear Night"

Night, jot-and-tittle breeze, a holy crow mis-en-scene.
It's one of those trick nights where a halo rings
Around the moon, racing against itself or
Orbiting or praying.

I need to be tended by rodents.
I need to be groped in a dark room and rubbed out.
I need to be culled, like snakes from a dutch oven.
I need to be clotheslined and sunburned.

and the backyard asks me when I'm leaving.
And the tomato baskets tell me I should probably go.
And the stars don't wink or twinkle, skulking through the dark.
And the motor clicks and the exhaust sputters.

Riffing on John Berryman's "Dream Song #14"

Life, friends, is boring. We tell it to each other daily.
The staccato signals and pixels bouncing into all those
heavy dilated eyes only remind us of our disappearing
'inner resources.' And it's all a drag. Inter-office
memos, statuses (stati?) and your late night video
journal about cats and the family you've never had
(but could have; damn the cats), these bore me,
the cheap bite of Canadian whiskey bores me,
the luster of your grandfather's pocketwatch
on your faux-oak dresser has dulled.
And the disordered woman through the wall coughs
on the hour, and she breathes me out
with the phlegm and spittle.

Draft 2: Metapoem

A Poem

Is a curse word, but not one of the awful
ones you can’t say on TV. I yell
it to myself when I stub my toe.
The cat will meow, asking what I’ve done.
I’m starting to think the meow is a poem.
Hi-fives—poem—
from all sides, clutching a plastic remote
for the glass-eyed flat-screen
we recite these and eat cheese
dip and Fritos.

In the day, when sun too hot
or wind too brisk moistens my
underarms—or the tenuous grasp
of tires on concrete slips,
the poem, from the exhaust pipe
that is not my mouth, sizzles upward
and onward—ho!—eating its way
through layer after layer of ozone.

The dentist noticed the poem
on my molars, the stains, he said,
would ease with time.
And careful, persistent brushing,
remember up and down? Left and right.
Don’t forget to floss, he said,
lest the poem come back.

Draft 3: On Food

Cock Sauce

We call it that and drizzle it on the deep
fried freezer enchiladas, liberally.
This is poor, he howls and cackles,
making a corporation of the meat
in a plastic bowl.
Its given name rings insect-like,
it crawls up the floral wallpaper
and spreads wings. You, brother,
can’t pronounce it. For you,
it’s cock sauce.
With rice beer and water we eat
the enchilada under a forty watt
bulb while the real roaches scale
the brick façade, feeling for some lost
familiar. My mom, in her wellworn apron,

Would say these should not mix—the Thai
and the Mexican (I’ve not said anything
about the non-syruped wafflettes) they
are kissing cousins. Well, Ma,
where do we live?

Draft 1, Something to do with Nature

A Hunt

We bend below the barbwire fence at Bartlett’s pasture
with slings of twenty-twos around our bony shoulders
and pistols in our jacket pockets. Now this is a hunt,
you whisper, your father won’t miss the bullets. I said
A full moon would be out but damn if there aren’t clouds
just above the silo. All the holsteens gather themselves
by these rusted-out Chevrolets, some prone, dew covered.
The flashlight cuts the black air where
Bartlett sleeps, his little white ranch, a paintchipped
swingset in the backyard. It’s not a big pasture
you say, waving your father’s Mag-Lite like a TV cop.
One of the heard hears me slip in the wet grass,
dirtying the knee of some camouflaged jeans—the bellows.
Do it, you hiss, teeth clenched,
and I do.

Now this is a hunt—
but when you take a rifle into a pasture, expect to only maim,
like my father with the lead ball still lodged in his cheek.
So when you say this is a hunt, I begin to know nothing
about it. Bartlett’s window alights, pale, yellow, obscured
by blinds and his wife’s lace curtains. The four green
fields on Stateline and Highpoint—they all belong to Bartlett.
The mist fades and the moon staggers in unwelcome, half
drunk, mooing like the cows and we are the cud—
only with petty rifles, petty bullet thieves we are.

Riffing on Louise Gluck's "Mock Orange"

It is not the moon, I tell you.
These flowers lighting the yard
make things far more lonely.
Petunias, oleander, viscous
petals and chrysanthemums,
my God, chrysanthemums.
I hate them.

The constant drip of a question,
a promise or premise of union
from your saline nasal spray
in a cupboard locked,
the key on a ring
in your backpocket.

Riffing on Andrew Hudgins' "Day Job and Night Job"

After my night job
I drank the moon, or
with the moon for a few minutes,
a Coke between my knees.

I sat in class and ate
Ramen warmed up,
fruits of the happening,
plodding through theorems

and mushmouth professors'
vitaes. Then comes soil
black coffee by the pot
and learning outside of logic.

Day job means I count the pills
that keep us awake and asleep
or somewhere between and
sedate, while all the women

there perk up their tits and suck
in their guts to preen a little
for the resident male, who spills
pills into his pockets and

counts them for his night job, wondering where the moon hides on cloudy nights.

Riffing on Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Amaryllis"

Sitting in the parlor on the bench
at the oak piano, not playing
you understand, sitting like a fern
in theis formal room, my fingers
want to play the blues. Blues can't
be read, I've been told. This suits me.
The page on the rest hold boxes
and lines with more darkened bold
periods, flags of little black countries.
Aunt Jan fingers the treble
clef and tells me to run through
the bass. Every good boy does
something, I think. She says
spaces spell face but hers
has sagged around the corners
of her mouth from years
of dusting this parlor while her husband
lied quietly beneath
an oak on Poplar St., purple heart
on the hearth in the parlor where I'm
fumbling with the blues.

Junkyarding 1-11

"You make a corporation of the meat" --Honey Boo Boo's lardy mother.
"Just bang if you need me" --Another Honey Boo Boo subtitled line.
"The Spice Girls are all in their late thirties now and all the guys from Hanson have families and children. JFK would be 90something. The floppy disk has gone the way of the dodo. Who the fuck knows what a dodo is?" --A redneck friend.
"Love is giving someone a Ruger .357 mag and knowing they won't blow your toe off." --Same redneck friend.
"Everybody pees most of the time" --Cousin Ethan
"Ninja cake" --random meme (is it so weird that the word meme looks like "me" but echoed? Self-gratification times two, I guess)
"The fruits of the happening" --don't know.
"Hosey meat" --Trailer Park Boys line.
"Supply and command" --Ibid
"The shit tornado to Oz" --Ibid.
"Lop of shit" --Lahey, Ibid

Riff on Naomi Shihab Nye's "Blood"

In the spring our palms peeled
like snakes. My father's
truck would crunch gravel
drive after work, red paint
faded a cruel pink.
The wrinkles on his bearded
face used to look like loss--
something given up under a pewter
sky where my sister
and I shucked corn with grandmother,
hands peeling like snakes.

Riffing on Stuart Dybek's "Little Oscar"

(Note: riff on the subject matter, rather than some of the language)

The fleamarket's dirt floor had turned to mud and the dollar in my backpocket itched against my ass. Mom, having one of her good days, pointed toward a glassware booth and her hand floated to my shoulders. It's a midget, she whispered (almost like a child), he's so cute. His back faced us, a large torso covered witha  Pantera T-shirt. I could imagine my mother asking the midget what Pantera was and why he wanted antique glassware, but then, I just wanted a hot dog. Acquire the desire to buy Oscar Meyer.
Later, when I was grown, I saw midgets wrestle in the Mt Zion gymnasium, the Baddest Little Show On Earth. The police chief hollered through the PA that the midgets would be late, like Barney Fife beneath those moldy stars and bars. I didn't see Pantera there.
But I have a goldfish.

Improv: Robert Hass's "A Story About the Body"

"and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands"

Her work was like the way she moved her body: cold and rigid and well-dreamt. When he read her turgid prose on Post It notes on the Frigidaire it compelled him to reach for a PBR. They made coffee three times daily, mainly for the scent, and she whistled out the greenleaf and wrote her endless promises to the pay-to-pub, PJ-clad, while he smoked Marlboros on the stoop as if waiting for a Greyhound. The dogs would bark when the cat clawed the Christmas tree or shit in the floor. Sometimes, sighing and craning, she would reach for a cigarette and hang it between her lips unlit. Where lines end they end without asking.

Little riff on Anne Sexton's "You, Doctor Martin"

"There are no knives / for cutting your throat"

There are no knives for cutting
your throat. We have doubled blades
to tenderize the poultry, metal
to liquify the yellow brick of America,
rock U's to keep the
black. Of course I love you, with
a cackle and sneer and fizzy beer
in your tummy. We made
potato logs and heard them scream
late-night-diner-waitress style--
two-toothed smile that
lets us know where the cats are.

Riffing on Edward Hirsch's "The Skokie Theater"

"Twelve years old and lovesick"

Twelve years old and lovesick, with the Dubble
Bubble and pitstains bouncing in an airless
van decal'd with GRAY HILL CHURCH OF GOD,
she and I watch the tiny CRT in the console,
a blue screen from an overtracked tape.
She smiles without lipstick
when I look out the window
at the pine thickets pushing,
rushing past. The Passion--
that Gibson postmortem--
begins in a half hour and Pastor Rick
has rented the whole theater where
we lift a gum-flecked armrest
and nobody sees. The bloody man on the
gray veil, whose first death brought
forth the adolescent tears when I heard the story
from a redheaded cousin in the front room
on creaky pine floors, the bloody
man moans in Aramaic. She had told
the story like she wasn't sure,
and had made it worse. Now,
between Caviezel's tortured
spittle and the subtitles--
who the fuck wants to read a movie?--
she and I, arms locked and popcorn,
the redfaced youth minister behind,
transfix.

Riffing on Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

(Just copping the form here, rather than jacking the language. Ended up kinda sing-songy)

My grandmother's smokes smolder in ashcans,
half soaked in water from a plastic oil pan.
They do not fear the lung or Birmingham steel--
They march single file to a Chevrolet's peal.

My grandmother's dentures click-clack in her mouth,
Smelling of elephants or dogsbreath vermouth.
Once she used a bicuspid for scratchoffs
and slipped them back on her gums when she lost.

My grandmother dies sometimes then revives, and
her smokes stain the tips of her storebought whites.
I don't think she can do it--die.
Something about smoke in a cerulean sky.

Riffing on Gildner's "First Practice"

"he was Clifford Hill, he was/ a man who believed dogs / ate dogs"

He said he was Cliff Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if there were any girls
present for them to please follow him
to the fire exit. Cliff Hill hailed
from Kentucky. Beltbuckle proud,
clutching it in a desultory pose.
The first blonde brought friends
through the smoke-cloud pool
room, and Cliff lurched toward
them. When Froggy goes a' courtin'.
The next morning, iced over, the PD
got him for vagrancy. He had slept in his car,
too drunk still that morning to find
Kentucky.

Improv: "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing"

Entry 5, riffing on Margaret Atwood’s “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing”

John Wayne Picks Up Biscuits

A Jack’s bathroom and a bigrig airhorn
blows and this gravy biscuit and John Wayne
hovers in line, selling a vision of himself
like a cologne ad in a stuffy magazine, desired.
The undesirables like me gaze
at the ten gallons atop his squared head.
He says, to the waitress,
the world is full of women who tell me
I look like him, like their long lost daddy,
a southern Brando with an overbite,
he says this and the biscuit’s on the house.
A blush for the hunk in the tight Wranglers
and leather belt spelling Dewayne
all ornate and dead. He turns to leave,
bag greased and spillable,
full of Styrofoam and massive coronaries.
I call my order to the waitress,
her tit quivering, visor askew.
She’s just seen a picture of God.
I do not ask to see the manager
when my sausage egg ‘n’ cheese comes
slathered in gray gravy.

Improv on "'What Do Women Want?'"

Entry 4, riffing on Kim Addonizio’s “What Do Women Want?”

What Do Men Want

I want a woman in a red dress,
I want her flimsy and cheap,
preferably a redhead, a lady Lazarus
with a sign around her neck:
Tear this sign from me.
I want to drive down
the street in a truck rumbling
mufflerless with her, her noticing
the bowler-hatted boys and the Hispanic
women with handfuls of cottons,
taking note for some future fix
she might need. Then I sling
her from the cab into a BUDGET INN
but the BUDGET has been effaced,
on my bony shoulder, and I lay her
down as payment. I want her
to unlook at me—to peer past me
on the lousy ____ INN bedspread,
as if I my face obscures the image of God.
I have not found him yet, and will
not find her in her red dress. Some days
with the broom and vacuum when cleaning
Room 15 or 16 with Lysol, after affairs,
I find satin underthings—
that I am obligated to trash
as per protocol—and wonder if the lady
who left them would care to be buried in them.

Improv: "wishes for sons"

Journal 3, riffing on Lucille Clifton’s “wishes for sons”


Wishes for an Ex on an Exercise Kick

I wish her cramps.
I wish her muscle spasms
and no bananas or mustard or halved, scored
tablets. I wish her insomnia.
I wish her fatigued dates
and why do I gotta get up
mornings.
I wish her lockjaw.
I wish her bitter sweat and
Gatorade by the gallon.
We know how much you loathe
to sweat and drive to the bar
with your old friends.
I wish your tits diminished. Let yourself think you’ve progressed
then take those Little Debbies
locked like liquor in the cabinet. Repeat.

Improv: "Colorado Blvd"

Entry 2, riffing on Lorna Dee Cervantes’ “Colorado Blvd”

“I wanted to die so I walked / the streets”

I wanted to die so I walked
to the liquor store and
gave them the slip
of paper I got from work that day.
They needed my ID to cash whatever
so I showed them my DNA—on the table.
The clerk spat on it.
And the hobo had a baby
in the guitar case and opened it when it
needed some food for the night. Second St.
After the liquor store, late one night in the clove
of cottonwood, perhaps I would tell you
the hobo was a lie. That he was an absent guitarist
strumming wildly what he had forgotten most. Hamlet’s
father. Someone’s car rattled with the thump of a sub
in the dirty street, a Cadillac, a big rangy thing
shaking the duplexes and mills and on down into the sewer,
where it hits hardest, they say.

Improv on "The Artist as Lefthander"

Journal entry 1

Riffing on Stephen Dunn’s “The Artist as Lefthander”

“Each morning, thinking of you, / I rise from the counterworld of sleep”

Starless and not thinking of you,
I rise from the counterworld of sleep
into the silence of the speaking world, the voices so garbled
I can’t register the solids. Earplugs,
headphones, ringtones, videos
that loop and loop and loop
until they puke. I want to speak, hear
that belltone voice of mine—you said—
but without anyone to listen,
the singer coiling in on himself on a black
box stage, spotlight hot, howling how he’s
learned the language with browning teeth.
You say the metaphor is dead
with your Turkish coffee and phone
ablaze, your glasses refracting its easy light.
A hum, a drone, a home.
Those bed-warped curls that bounce
to electric rhythms in your bedroom,
they compose orchestral pieces
like all those bewigged fucks I can’t stand
when you bring them up over stale toast and eggs.