Pomo Literati hosted by Frank Andrick

Cool San Francisco Spoken word radio show--check it out.

Poem a Day

A Poem a day here.

 

HOMO QUISQUILIAE  (JUNKMAN)

Jest another cranky cobalt crook, a tethered brat’s one-trick pony trapped in a propped-up crack, cobras break her fall into all this paradise, and we are content to seek the one step before beyond—hands that held the head that cried human tears. There was a prize for cropping hair and drinking beer. A knight, a rook to queen’s pawn one, to rack and ruin, a young man’s only honest hearth and home. Such crumbs rumble like thunder in our hearts. Once in a lifetime he runs over her thumb and fumbles with the locks—hairdressers, window dressers, undressing becomes us, our only honest crabwalk towards that opening, love.

(No! I will never thumb my nose again!)

We run instead, comrades, screeching cables and brakes, labor over levers, throated throttles to ‘at toboggan’s banking ‘round some curves woven by breezes blown through sometime summers. We vote for the hive of love and arrive at this; we’re done, have been left out in the rain, timeless bicycles, unnamed dolls, our itchy scalps above shock-rimmed eyes rolling open and shut, open and shut, our Humpty-Dumpty grins a sin to each and every one of the king’s men.

A heap! A heap! My kingdom from a heap of trash!

Love is still the most revolutionary debt we could ever call in. Without usury, a first step towards the use of life and the evolution of value. No slogan, but the only surviving form of the word “interest” draws me in—fragment of a whole, the only alliance worth re-realizing, the mote that the eye knew as the measure of its sight, the parameters of entropic erotic enterprise.

Life! The timer ticks and we make hay—if we’re luckily disposed to do so—by breaking wheat up into flour, fruit-flowering ourselves inside-out for each other; we turn suitors without suits and ask for 31 favors, tear ourselves asunder, rending our dues, aping our axes, suing our lawyers for lax black graft in heaps out back, and we sit favorably influenced by another female-named hurricane called, appropriately, L-O-V-E-Y.

As the wise man was once wont to sing, “Love, it’s a broken thing.”

It mirrors all of my cracks.

12/2011

Florence

Since the class helped me out with this one in the workshop, I thought you might like to read the re-write and hear the performace that I cooked up for it. Thanks, folks!  --Lee

My Life

Video I did last semester, Fall 2011. Thanks Lee! 

By

Alexander

just friends

we ride bikes home

(west winds blow sand

across cracked pavement)

and you ask,

"can we just be friends?"

i hesitate--

then answer,

"i don't know"

our ride continues in silence

(soft skies bleed gold

over stormy seas)

and another sunset goes unnoticed

Relentless, satisfying; I had to turn away but couldn't turn it off until after the end.

Quantifying the Rock

I spoke with a friend of mine, a Phd student of economics at American University about our mutual lack of desire for a romantic relationship, yet our equal interest in those of others. I explained to him that a friend of mine was upset because her boyfriend had never had sex before her. She was annoyed that she was his only experience.

"Is the sex bad?" I asked her.

"It's amazing".

Isn't that strange? I asked my friend on the phone. Strange that the relationship is perfect and the sex is great yet somehow she's bothered that he's "without experience".

"Exchange theory" I said, "we value difficulty. Rare things are valuable like diamonds for example. Sure they have warehouses full of the things but the market is controlled to make them seem less common and for because of that they're desirable and expensive".

My friend was quiet for a moment and thought about it, "but if he's never had sex before her wouldn't that make him more valuable, rare, and more important?" He asked. I thought about it.

"No. No, because men cannot have sex whenever they want. They are like rocks. Women can have sex whenever they want and in the world of sex they are diamonds. So, for a man to have 'tried and failed' that is not 'rare or desirable'. In fact it's sad. If we wanted to quantify love the only way to do it is by partners. Men who have had many partners are more successful, more unique, it quantifies their characters strengths, and because men don't come by sex nearly as easy as women potentially could their value goes up. However, women can have sex any moment of their life with most people they would like and therefore the desired number is lower, which shows they are difficult. All difficult things are desired."

"Did you compare men to rocks"

"Yes, it's a decent comparison. I use it frequently".

"Dick".

"in fact...that's why you value our friendship".

"Difficulty?"

"Yes. Rocks are always pursuing the diamonds. Way of the world".

Just felt like posting this! Happy holidays, writers!

Untouched Thoughts

I sing to the ground, the cold blanket you claim.

Grass and maggot, your halo-- I press my face against your button, pebbles pock my cheek, we are united like the Sunday comfort of couch and soft snoring.

You were tired then, as I am tired now, but were you so tired of living?

I disgrace your name, the one I hold spiritually between my birth and submission to a life I never wanted. But I hear you always wanted the best, worked to death; now I work to forget that I want to die like you. A reunion in memory of someone I forget. You are no longer my mother in times of anger.

An orphan to time, the way it's stripped me of my youth. I am constantly naked, propped as prey, my only place. I knew you just as well as I know myself. Put together by assumption, my consumption the measure of self-worth. There is no one here to keep my place on Earth. I wonder who will speak for me, as I speak for you. Will they put all the wrong words in my dry mouth?

Perhaps I've mistaken just who I thought you were.

The spirals I hide behind-- peer in, peer out. I hear I have your hair, your shape, the same taste in betrayal and self motivation. But I never want to wake, as I remember your morning routine. Wax on, wax off. The last time I saw you, your body was cast in wax. My lips touched your skin, gritty with morgue cosmetics. I couldn't grab your hand, it was cemented to your belly. I could have crawled into your bed then, like I did most nights, you'd lie exhausted, my memories of you always rushed.

Now I have no bed to return to, so I rush to another's. Pinched nerve, something intimate. I wake with contacts slunk in my sockets, the way another can weigh on your conscience. How heavy and dry has my memory of you become?

I wrote you a letter, slipped it into your casket. Now a time capsule, my roots in the Earth, your box. That was the day I buried my innocence. I live like the bitter taste black coffee leaves on the tongue. Caffeine makes me reel in discomfort, my heart beats too fast. No surgeon's hand could force your heart to start up again, for it was their own hand that stopped it. Their neglect, similar to your lover's.

Didn't you know there were others who loved you? Your own creation, a mirror of self. I hide from my reflection, as if by meeting my own eye I'd have to tell you the truth.

I'd forgotten how to love you.

Edoardo Sanguineti

Nicely done!