Last Bender

The name we give a yearning after or getting chased Love and paranoia the reaction accelerates

        On the way to the car I passed McSorley’s. I could’ve let it slide. Nothing would’ve pleased me more in fact, except maybe an ice cream cone with nuts and sprinkles. But I had to stick it in. It had to be.         The door dinged open and shut. I gave the bottles the [...]

  From Blake’s Public Address on his Engraving of Chaucer’s Pilgrims   This is Blake on originality in art. He’s talking mostly about engravers in England but he applies his thought to poetry as well. He attacks Monopolizing Traders and blames them for foisting bad art on the public and as a result making people [...]

To the Sidewalk Scaled With Rain   Are you a lizard or the look of stupefaction Eyes frying in their holes conceive a slithering Pavement their pain assembles on the ground ahead It dances darts hypnotic till the displaced eyes Disturb themselves at play   The lizard liquefies and roils Yards of tendons coil like [...]

Jail’s a good place for reading books. And a ship at sea. Men on submarines read a lot, and in the Antarctic. But the place I’ve read the most has been in decompression chambers, after working in a diving bell. You’re breathing helium. And there’s just nothing else you can do for weeks at a [...]

it’s ok to prick your finger, but you can’t finger your prick. i spent so many hours in my basement listening to his shitpissfuckcuntcocksuckermotherfuckerandtits album. i had a blacklight, a mildewy old couch and glopaint on the walls. this was before i started taking drugs or anything. it was 6th, 7th grade. george carlin was [...]

I wrote this poem in 1983 or ’84, I think. Maybe even 1982. People used to tell me they had no idea what I was writing about, but liked the music or the images. My idea of a poem was one of music and images. It wasn’t until some time in my thirties, or the [...]

I was standing over the middle of the river when I suddenly couldn’t account for my actions. Why had I done what I just did. I did not want to undo it and so I walked on. It is the same with love and friendship. I can catalogue the physical sensations of either but why [...]

“Voluntary solitariness is that which is familiar with Melancholy, and gently brings it on like a siren, a shoeing-horn, or some Sphynx, to this irrevocable gulf, a primary cause Piso calls it; most pleasant it is at first, to such as are melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers, to walk [...]

“PA UBU.–Hornstrumpet! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.” Bosse De Nage is the baboon who accompanies Dr. Faustroll on his adventures in Jarry’s [...]