Steve Halle (Illinois, USA): "yao"

dear Jackson Pollock's memory,

oh well i tend to agree with the crying/passion/exhaustion argument but
you've put me in a tough spot yet again. living with the enemy of our
undefined yet common belief sys. don't worry abt being defensive and btw
it's molehills but n e ways. what r u signing my year book or something?
and this faculty meeting day makes me want to quit my job idealistically like
student in Updike short story "A&P" and are we going to just become
vagrants? & is that all of "what's left" to do? and and and listen to Brahms
4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf? and
read like I no wtf? and write things so obscure even me the transparent
eyeballed creator doesn't know wtf it all means? I guess the point was
I'm tired right now tired like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways
and ways I can't defend or argue abt but it might just be time to lay low &
there are no readily avail. times on any foreseen horizons for such lazy
nonsensical endeavors. On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer. I'm
better at buying books than reading them but they don't and I don't
understand why not they don't pay you for that more likely the opp. and i
know what's-his-name sd steal this book and all that but i don't feel like
being cooped up ether. I mn either. an epic struggle between man and
material might unfold. lots of luck, honey.

love, not chaos,
s

This poem originally appeared in issue 11 of the print journal Ocho, guest edited by Adam Fieled, in 2007.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "A Poet in Center City #44"

What was new to me then was being alone in Center City. It was no longer the case that every time I left my apartment, I was guaranteed a new adventure. I became more settled in my habits. The Last Drop was convenient for me in many ways; it became part of my daily routine. I would sit there with a stack of books and do my academic work and write. Letters to Dead Masters began as an idea from that. John at this point was on his way out, off to L.A. to do video work. Christopher I saw fairly often; he was engaged briefly, then that broke off. Ricky studiously avoided running into me, though he was situated at Temple too. The Temple campus, in North Philadelphia, was a disappointment— a concrete jungle. Anderson Building, where dwelt the English Department on floors nine-eleven, was particularly hideous— a sky-rise done in tacky “nouveau” style. The English Department had all uncarpeted floors, and I was given an office with no windows. Because it was so forbidding, being on the Temple campus always elicited a crepuscular feeling in me. I was both doing and attending random readings around Center City; but none had the cohesive magnetism of the Free School shows. Many of the Center City streets seemed to have languished into deadness with the coming recession, or perhaps been petrified. I came up with the term “visionary deadness” to describe Center City then. It was a contradictory term, and meant that way. When I found myself reunited with Trish, I still enjoyed the funky, earthy ambience of West Philly— the Satellite Café, Mariposa, Clark Park. Trish and I, nonetheless, were forced to do an uncomfortable dance then. We had been, and remained, licentious about sex and drugs; but the holy shrine Trish set up around her painting highlighted something I’d missed the first go-round. Trish sought obsessively to remain, through her paintings, as pure as possible in the world. I was making careerist compromises left and right to advance my literary interests; compromises Trish frowned upon. If her painting life was forced to remain a privatized enterprise, she would deal. Sometimes, she did. But she felt hostile to the idea of any interference at all, and it meant that she was often lost, for months and years at a time, in inactivity. I was as brusquely active as I could possibly be. There was a level of my thinking I sought to hide from her— everything I did, any strides made towards public recognition, were being made to advance her interests as well. If she lacked the gumption to make herself famous, I would corral some extra gumption and do it for her. I never stopped believing in her, even as this time there was nothing quite as festive about nudity and pot smoke. We had the nights mechanically built into us from before, and dutifully followed through our usual scripts. With my new sense of place-vibes, anything at a substantial tangent to Center City, yet still related to it, worked for me (including Temple) when I was in the right mood. And I missed Tobi, who was painting at genius level then. 
 © Adam Fieled 2012-2023

Vlad Pogorelov (Rocklin, California, USA): "No. 105"

I wanted to kill myself for years
But I always lived on the first floor
And the gun shops won't sell a gun
To a foreigner with a criminal background
It's not that there are no other ways to do it
I dreamt of drinking myself to death
But after hours of puking
I discovered that life is O.K.
As long as you don't have to punch
Somebody's time-clock
Or when you're drunk but are still
Able to drive
And the classical music
Or a beautiful woman,
Or a decent typewriter,
Or a good friend,
Who is not asking you for some
Cash until Friday, every other day

At the moment,
I am still alive
We made love 3 times last night
It's 2:20 p.m.
I had two cups of tea,
Three cigarettes,
Plus some beer for breakfast
My woman is in the shower
She lives on the third floor
(Too low to jump
and I don't want to be crippled)

P.S.: She came out of the shower.
Looked at the first line. Put her hands
On my shoulders and said firmly:
"If you're gonna kill yourself, I'm gonna
Kill you, son of a bitch. Besides,
I don't need blood in my apartment."


© 1997

Rodrigo Toscano (New York, USA): "The Promise"

I've listened to a good number of subaltern aesthetic movements.

I've mini-mighted my feet in the direction of their promise.


Godzilla, in his dark green coarse coat, "a city— all mine! well, sorta."


My emotional walls are thin as paper; the walls are collapsing, one onto the other; sharpest pencil to run-of-the-millest pulp; charms, alarms.


My molar.


You, you don't speak, you won't speak, even though your young family's behind the waterfall screaming in ecstasy.


Spalding Gray was found floating in my neighborhood polluted river-front.


I nurture (quite literally) no one thing; it's the blanks I venture.


Look at that speck of light, hear Mayakovsky's imprint, At These Four Strokes.


Two negations, one tucked inside the other.


I'm cued up to be a social infant "in the middle of my path" (in the dog days of my ways).


I'm cued up to speakafter you.


I've glistened too long in the sun without sympathetic, beluga-like realities, popping up for air.


I've maxi-minded my manners with the most uninsurrectional crowd I've ever encountered.


I hear a thousand fifes in the distance— fuck, I know that's bad.


My spongy sack o' cum.


"I"— ain't a problem at all, it's the "You" that's the thicket.


Spalding Gray left his loft early in the morning; it was 11 degrees that day.


What a chilly thing to say, "You, you don't speak, you won't speak, even though your young family's behind the waterfall screaming in ecstasy."


I fracture (quite literally) everything; it's the particles I assume.


Listen to assemblages of flesh, hear Artaud At These Four Strokes 


Two suppositions, one slipped-knotted into the other.


I've been roped into being a representationalist "in the midst of a dark forest" (in the Aurora Borealis of the now) 


I've been tugged hard to speakafter you.



©  Rodrigo Toscano 2009