Last Bender

POEM DAY 11 He’s dead definitely dead Note the lividity and the purple spittle Foam not spittle sir Yes foam and the split in his breeches Where the electrode goes National inventor hero and the elephant In the circus and the horse and the pigeon Note the lividity sir! That would be Leviticus my lord [...]

Microtel NY Indiana stoned in the car again america’s middle was long ago; this age of what Let me be severe as weather can be and sing while doing the parking lots of South Bend in search of Band-Aids Their flotsam follows them to the pool sneakers, socks, shorts and shirt in a trail that [...]

Alfred Starr Hamilton to the Rescue! A while back New Jersey poet Lisa Borinsky tracked me down in my office to ask if I had any Alfred Starr Hamilton material. Why would a totally unknown poet and novelist living in Ithaca have any archival material relating to an obscure poet who at first appears to [...]

Morning burns and crackles in the leaves and the nuns of Villa Maria are gone. Where their dusty wombs once sat is a conference center.

A thousand spleened suns Could not turn off the barking The fleas themselves were all afire And i scratched till blood Matted the hairs of my scalp It was a wineglass victory A headless triumph It was graeco-roman alchemy on the Nile I was a Jack Lindsey joint In a Spike Lee monograph And it [...]

Have they not got law schools in china Why do i have greasy lips What have you been kissing Are the results in yet Are the parameters just Where are the tastes On what part of the body Do we climb yet or sit down There is nothing here i don’t know People have been [...]

The serious scholarly activity of PhD poets, sane and measured as it is, or purports to be, is simply professionalism, ventriloquism, transvestism. In the arts there are no rational theses, just the dressed up rantings of hallucinating primitives. Poets are witch doctors in suits, shamans with TVs, witches who ride old Volvos instead of broomsticks. [...]

I wrote this poem for my daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Scott, and read it at their wedding last weekend. It is a pastoral poem. I couldn’t find anything to read, despite ransacking my library, and these lines popped into my head. Why not follow the trail, i thought. This is the result. I really [...]

On False Naivete Not long ago i sent my curmudgeonly friend Philip a Kimya Dawson song I like, and he sent back a curmudgeonly reply, to the effect that he loathes Kimya Dawson and all of her ilk because he loathes false naiveté. I do still love the song I sent (Underground) but find his [...]

Day 1 i have loved lies the I’s of deception remote and infinite there is no gesture that can brink it and so the circle closes not a halo but a worm hole out of Dr. Who stretching from one devastated planet to another from a planet of dust formed from the crumbs of ingested [...]