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.