Last Bender

The Ground Plan the ground plan is obvious here are eyes there exit signs deep confusion on the lower floors galleries and such fiends and fangs and blowtorch touches gothic purple slang flesh hangs into pots of glue Egypt’s all the rage next draped in parachutes I Dream of Genie tents with waiters silver service [...]

This is a variation of a poem I posted earlier, Fire, See the World Through the Eyes of Fire. Both are drawn from a manuscript that dates from January 2007. I was unsatisfied with earlier versions of the poem and rewrote it from the manuscript. Then I realized there were two or three poems in [...]

If I could write one book as good as Charles Willeford’s Pick Up I’d put down my pen and feel fulfilled. I could retire to my garden and family or buy an old tobacco shop and slowly desiccate among the shelves of borkum riff and Virginia shag. But I have no talent for the perfect [...]

Fire Day   he was naked all the year they came to talk and gaze and every city had no shame   they came to say the days are as they are   the place and time are evil the dance arranged; drinks punctuate the festive drizzle thirst is not assuaged.   smoke fills up [...]

See the world through the eyes of fire Prisoner of glass and metal, like a girl, Pouring down and up a mountain ridge. The mind yawns the early dark Shuts down the sky. There is no silence No void but in ideas The empty patterns of things to come   I do not feel the [...]

WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL The Malay Archipelago; The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise; A Narrative of Travel With Studies of Man and Nature. 2 volumes. Macmillan & Co., London, 9 March 1869: The Durian is, however, sometimes dangerous. When the fruit begins to ripen it falls daily and almost hourly, and accidents [...]

This a poem of George Oppen’s, a favorite of my friend Randy. I had read Oppen and not had much sympathy for him until Randy showed me this one, in The New Collected Poems. But all of that is for another post. For now I just want to put this poem up. Psalm   Veritas [...]

I am an empty Universe A mirror flashing in the sky Your light my love and mine And then we die

This is an excerpt from the middle of Endangered Species. I’m going to post the whole thing one of these days but for now it’s going to be excerpts, and an excerpted novel isn’t always all that comprehensible. In this part my characters are putting on a show, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. It’s a sort [...]

A journal from DC called Big Cigars published this one in 1990. I have no idea when I first wrote it. Maybe 1986 or ’85. I’m right now rooting around for another poem that goes with it, with the three hungry lizards and the beets the size of basketballs.There are no lizards, beets or basketballs [...]