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.