Poetry

Your Poem Is The End of War
---

It has come to my attention
that no one has dedicated
a poem to you.

I am to blame
for many things:

staring blankly

my eating habits

my occasional hippopotamus
heart, bobbing
on the river Nile,

but I am to blame
specifically
for not having written you a poem.

Your poem exists,
but I can't explain to myself
how to write it.

Your poem is the Berlin Wall Falling
and the Perestroika, and neither.

It is a Once-Communist Republic
holding elections for Office of

You Give Me Goosebumps.
Your poem has a chest,

and on the depth of its chest
a small terrorist cell hides.

Your poem is the collaborative effort
of this terrorist cell and animal activists,

It is peace talks and detonators in my heart,
It has a cameo by your dog-to-be, Trotsky.

Your poem is a little girl from Kiev
meeting a little boy from Cuba

with thirteen dollars in his pocket
crossing the atlantic ocean alone.

Your poem is what we were once promised:
the sutured end of the war, our hearts

stitched together, so that we beat unison,
so that I am alive and you are alive, IT'S ALIVE!!

And your poem is a city of bears in your bed.

Your poem imitates
everything about you
that I love:

I love you like a circus
that comes trotting in
to a lonely old ghost town
that's me, I'm the boy who dreams
of the elephants and acrobats
and of joining your circus
as a magician of sorts,

I can make your soldiering heart
hold democratic elections, once more.

Poetry: Introduction (A Poem for Poetry)

You don’t need philosophy
to read a poem, much less to be
pierced by a poem, or to feel
its force, tugging your inner child
like a hummingbird of words.

You don’t need science to read poems.
Poems are beasts that defy atomic theory
and undergo Lamarckian Evolution:
rocks that want to be peeled into horses;
lungs turned into gills and meteor stones.

You don’t need these theories, to explain
how the heart, chipped in pieces, floats
in your chest like plasma. The wings
of these poems cannot be kept inside

(Sometimes I want to be Icarus, melt them
so that they don’t haunt me at night.)

You don’t need to read these poems
like expensive restaurants, a-la-carte—
if you do, expect your mouth to dry
out like cardboard and oil stains—
cement upon a vagabond’s skin.

Please read carefully as I tell you stories.
You don’t need philosophy or science.
Only your heart will do.

A Bit of Poetry

Charles Bukowski. who ever said good ol chinaski was just an asshole with an ugly face that called himself a writer?

For Jane
====

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

-- Charles Bukowski

A Bit of Poetry

The Lonesome Radio

the lonesome radio walks
like an orchid, a phaleanopsis,

quietly, without looking.
a long overcoat inside,

it smiles the kind of smile
that must be silent in the east coast,

and tells me about loving a woman 
in nineteen-seventy-six

when still an immigrant of hearts.
I think back, timelessly, like late-May sky.

the lonesome radio told me that Flaubert
was lost in literature and self-destruction.

the lonesome radio told me the soul 
wants to become three colors,

like three balloons or newspaper stands,
or three men walking in the afternoon.

I wanted to tell you that I dreamt of mine 
becoming red-yellow-black like arrows 

like children like nauseating oceans.
the lonesome radio tunes in just once,

while being drawn upright, and asks me
If I still look up when I think of sunrises, 

If I find them dangerous for our cells.
I say yes, like high-altitudes, despotic,

short of breath, I say sunrises make me
sticky & unmovable, confused & tangled.

maybe our souls are like living frequencies
mine a different pattern than yours
 
like bitten nails like striated muscles.
the lonesome radio told me that

I am grayscale without you, simple waves.
that night you wrote me back to tell me

that memory lives inside you as poems,
like radio frequencies like lonesome souls.

Question: Is there a song that has moved you beyond words?

Yes, there are many. and Albums, too. some of the ones i can name right away off the top of my head:

The Microphones - The Moon
Neutral Milk Hotel - Two-Headed Boy part 2
The Weakerthans - (Hospital Vespers)
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Broken Social Scene - Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl

the list probably goes on, but out of those, the NMH song is closest to my heart.

There's something so honest about this song that makes me shiver every time:

Daddy please hear this song that I sing
In your heart there's a spark that just screams
For a lover to bring a child to your chest that could lay as you sleep
And love all you have left like your boy used to be
Long ago wrapped in sheets warm and wet

Blister please with those wings in your spine
Love to be with a brother of mine
How he'd love to find your tongue in his teeth
In a struggle to find secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight
Sounding only at night as you sleep

In my dreams you're alive and you're crying, as your mouth moves in mine soft and sweet, rings of flowers around your eyes and I'll love you for the rest of your life...

Brother see we are one in the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see
Don't you take this away
I'm still wanting my face on your cheek

And when we break we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

Two headed boy she is all you could need
She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires
And retire to sheets safe and clean
But don't hate her when she gets up to leave

over and out,
the UG'ster

A Bit of Poetry

A Translation by a poem by Mario Benedetti

The Defense of Happiness
---

Defend happiness as the trenches
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and the miserable 
from the transient absences
and the definitive ones

defend happiness as a principle
defend it from fright and nightmare
from the neutral ones and the neutrons
from the sweet disgraces
and the darkened diagnostics

defend happiness as a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the guileless and the guilty
from the rhetoric and the heart attacks
from the endemic and from the academic

defend happiness as a destiny
defend from the fire and the firemen
from suicides and homicides
from the leisurely and the overwhelming
from the obligation of happiness

defend happiness as a certainty
defend it from oxidation and filth
from the famously worn-out time
from the morning dew and opportunism
from the prostitutes of laughter

defend happiness as a right
defend it from god and from the winter
from capitalization and death
from last names and regrets
from probabilities
                          and from happiness as well.

A Bit of Poetry

The Science of Goodbyes
-----
Sometimes I feel my skin is a city
in Spain, where you live as a gypsy

and I hate how you stand in Madrid,
in El Museo del Prado, naked, 
hunching over your body 
with a dolphin at your feet.

Symmetry, Spirituality: 
the crude-and-cruel architecture 
of your breasts, as a statue,
much like you, 
but refusing to be photographed alive. 

I’m learning how to use Cable Theory and 
squid nerves, electricity of the brain,
models to explain how I woke up in Barcelona,
dreaming about your molecules.

I wanted to wrap you in myelinated sheets
to conserve your signals 
or maybe open up my chest 
and shelter you like a butterfly
in a bullet-proof vest.

I sit in the cross-town bus 
listening to others in love, 
or searching for love, 
making up explanations 
for the concreteness of angels

or theories of how space-time 
folds over our backs
when we swim together. 
A scientific theory
can always be proven wrong, 
so we believe in astrology, 
the throw of the dice, our heart 
as an oracle. Vividly I remember: awake,

thinking you were pressed against me, and I see
the marina instead, with the boats and the sea,
clumsily imitating your irises,
not as grey or iridescent.
These are the strange things I dream about: 
two bodies with one head, 
our souls collapsed like childish lungs. 
When dreaming, I am confused 
like the wall is confused
when I drive a nail through its flesh,

the same wall upon which I kissed your
necklace, leaving an antiquated aura of glory.
Afterwards, I rearranged my furniture and lungs
to be closer to the lights, to see you reflected
in the windows as a maybe-comeback-goodbye,

expanding, smiling, unraveling the arteries.

"for AJS, the duck, the lion and the green pants."
Published in Quarto Magazine, 2006

Post-Modern Romantic Manifesto

Watch out, cynics and poets with no blood or bones. We will get you, unveiling how you have transformed poetry into a dull, rotten science. we will unveil what the common purpose of your art is to twist and turn to the sound of the inhumane machine. We will unveil how you eat cynicism to survive and kill the only human quality we possess over everything else: Love.

We the undersigned, have wowed to write and feel and be alive, and know that love must be retrieved from the deep darkness that it has fallen into. We live in New York City, a place where love has been arrested at sunrise, eternally. We live here and we work, and read, and study in the metric machine to destroy the cogs and wheels that have been ruling through its ghastly heart. We will take back the humanity that we have lost from you, the elitist writer, the man of technicalities and syntax, and we will fight against losing our humanity. We will uphold what others have fought for--what other poets were fighting for through their sword-poems.

We want to revive the notion of romantic poets, poets who defy postmodernism and view it as an attempt to pidgeon-hole the soul of man. we want everyone to enjoy poetry, from the leader of masses to the breadmaker. We want everyone to come sing with us, and for us to sing about being human and loving. We uphold Kurt Vonnegut's claim that the true purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved. We uphold Dylan Thomas as we rage against the dying of what makes us human. We uphold Ginsberg as we fight against the humanistic starvation of the soul in our modern society. We will chant to Kenneth Koch, imitating a match, bursting into flame, or the water boiling...

This is not a passive movement. This is the boiling point--it speaks of urgency. Join us if you still think there is a light to keep alive in the wick of the human soul.

For us, the spark resides in writing about being human and about love, about the spirit and how it won't be buckled into submission. For you it may be dance, the thickness of paint or photographs. We want you to express the same feeling in your medium, no matter what it is. We encourage public displays of affection, we encourage the abhorement of cynicism.

this is what a post-modern romantic is.

A Bit of Poetry

Translocation
-----

“Our love will be a mountain,” I told her.

It will take ten thousand years
to accumulate enough soot
in its heart to destroy
                         sunrises—
it will stand hunched-over and awkward.

We’ll wake up one day
with our stomachs stretched
like rivers, over its heart.
I like to think of mountains
when I think of people:
the time it takes for them
to grow in your mind,
the uses of snow in cruelty,
hills in silence.

On the outside, older poems are running as far as they can into the ocean.


“Our love will be a human being,” I told her.

There will be organs and nerves for
complexity. Purkinje Fibers will
transmit trembling from lips
to the core of the heart.
The synaptic cleft, an abyss
between your nose,
                    mine.

Eventually, tumors will grow
on this body, much like chain-
smoking entrepreneurs with blue
eyes. Our spinal chord will cry
loudly in the mornings.

Older poems will be red blood cells, empty membranes on circulation, feeding others.


“Our love will be a city,” I told her

There will be parks 
but oh so          naked,
the streets will kiss 
and merge frequently.
We’ll have fruit stands,
 even restaurants.
We’ll have arteries 
of buses and railroads, 
always crowded, 
waiting for a green light
or a moment to explain 
                  how their afternoon went.

But the city grows, 
uncontrollably, with asphalt
over lilies and other 
parts of the earth. 
It will eat up the rivers, 
it will fester and coagulate 
like a wound.

Our older poems will be trains, always leaving for the countryside, never returning.

and then what will we have, 
our mountain trembling, 
our body decaying, our city dying?

“There will be valleys, 
  meaning, other people:
                for the mountain to spy upon,
                for the body to sleep upon,
                for the city to grow into.

Our older poems will gallop eternally out of the valleys, into the tundra.”