P.F.S. Post: June 2024

Mark Young gives us...

Mark Young gives us 100 Titles from Tom Beckett.

Jeffrey Side on the Art & Language Group.

From Something Solid in The Seattle Star.

Mary Walker Graham (Boston, USA): "A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever"

When I say pit, I’m thinking of a peach’s. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings— the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern— an ocean’s inside us— a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the fluorescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I’ll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can’t touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

Brian Kim Stefans (Los Angeles, California, USA): "Complaint of Pierrot"

from Laforgue

Oh, that model soul
bade me her adieu
because my eyes…too?
lacked principle.

She, such tender bread
(now a Wonder loaf)
…typical! gives birth
to one more brat.

For, married, she is
always with a guy
who is a “nice guy,”
hence his genius.

© Brian Kim Stefans 2007

Steve Halle (Palatine, Illinois, USA): from Map of the Hydrogen World: "to 3rd grade John who liked motorcycles"

for Roy Nathanson

john who liked motorcycles did it again,
wet his pants again (i found out later
he had a catheter) the other boys smelled
it and shot insults from across the classroom
like “hey pissy boy” or “smells like a urinal
in here” i sat next to john so i smelled
piss too but i didn’t mind so much
i talked to John and he laughed
so i knew he hadn’t heard the other guys
yet but my nostrils were giving out
and i couldn’t breathe for the urine
but i’ve got to keep talking
but i’m running out of things to say!
i fake it i tell jokes quote movies anything—
gibberish voices vaudeville
john’s laughing harder now and the asshole
boys disappear blurring
into their desks until all i can hear
is my own voice speaking in tongues
and John roaring, reeking of piss.
it was my first poem.

© Steve Halle 2008

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): Letters to Dead Masters: #29

George,

Strange dream last night. I was in bed all over again, in my apartment. I awoke, in the dream, to find Jena Strayner crawling across the floor, not far from the bed, as though she were a caterpillar. Only, she was a brunette this time, and didn’t look older than ten years old. Her face remained unchanged. I asked her what she was doing here. She slithered backwards slightly, propped herself up on her elbows, looked me dead in the face, and said, “Because you are my husband, I am eternally damned.” The feeling in the air was charged with menace. I felt something issue from her head, land next to the couch. It was a kind of whirligig— a congeries of raw consciousness data to fall into, veering off into the insanity of perceived damnation. I had an ESP moment, and knew that she was anticipating her death, in her mind’s eye. But because she was ten years old, a brunette, and a caterpillar, all the menace-n-macabre crap in the air was charged also, with a tinge of the absurd. The sting of it was that when I woke, I did feel a strange energy in the apartment, a sense of the whirligig being real. I did live through my share of macabre moments with Ms. Strayner. What could be more macabre than room 510 of the Atherton Hilton? Or up-all-night in a trailer in Liverpool, Harrisburg ‘burbs?

In waking news: with Dana now flaunting the guy she’s seeing, I’m left to scope out other diversions. One is Kris, who I’ve finally been able to establish contact with. While she was unchaining her bike today, I managed to talk to her about a pertinent issue— the Grind no longer has a permit to allow outside seating. This means that we have to drag chairs from inside outside, on the few warm sparkling autumn days we have left. Today is one. Kris, up close, is vastly more sardonic (and shrewish) than Dana is. With her voluptuous proportions, she actually reminds me a little of Liz Taylor in Taming of the Shrew. The difference is that Shakespeare’s Kate has no real sense of irony; Kris does. Kris has in her eyes that knowingness which says, quite plainly, once I’ve seen you with your pants off, I own you; once I own you, you become so magnificently ridiculous that you’re to be held in my back pocket (nowhere else) interminably. If you want to call Dana and Kris the Doublemint Twins, Kris is certainly the more sinister of the two twins. What redeems her is honesty. Dana’s veneer of niceness is always holding her back, especially considering how transparent it is. Kris just scoffs and rolls her eyes. Salt on the surface.

One thing that is worth saying about Dana Blasconi: she comes from country stock, but she is by no means a typical country girl. True country girls always err towards the timid, the meek. They lack gumption, nerve in general. For Dana Blasconi to begin in the sticks, and wind up kicking serious ass (hokey contrivances and all), as she does here at the Grind in Center City Philly, bespeaks unusual courage, and an equally unusually robust sense of self. Dana didn’t settle for the country deal at all. I can’t not link her in my mind to Jena Strayner, who superficially partook of country life, all its lack of amenities. Jumping into a shotgun marriage which included all kinds of pornography-worthy sex, with the damned degenerate who happens to be writing this missive, was about raw courage, country values be damned. Jena Strayner belonged in Center City Philly as much as Dana does. Just as Dana belongs…anyway, both of them earn, for whatever it’s worth, kudos from me about what it means to rebel fruitfully in the world, whatever stump-dumb aegis you happen to begin under. By staking a big claim on living a big life, however much I criticize them in my writing (this applies more to Dana), criticism will always be tempered by warmth and admiration.

By the way, Chip did finally show up today. We got, unfortunately, into a rather nasty argument. Chip is one of those semi-artist meatheads who insist (and it is a very American position) that an artist should be judged by the size of his or her audience. So, Bruce Springsteen becomes better than Beethoven, Allen Ginsberg superior to John Keats, and the Abstract Expressionists ride high over Goya. Chip even goes far enough to say that Bruce rivals Ludwig in musical complexity. I hit him with every imaginable jab — what art is to me (which has, built into, layers of snobbery which I embrace), what constitutes cultural hierarchies that actually work (over centuries), why America has seldom been taken seriously by world artists (and Larsen). I know, of course, what the subtext of Chip’s argument is— I’m every bit the artist you are, and my opinions matter as much as yours. Well, no they don’t. At the crucial, culminating moment, I revealed to Chip that 1) he is not an artist, 2) he’s not even as good as I am at playing rock music, 3) his opinions on the arts, particularly the higher arts, are all hokey contrivances that are by no means commensurate with mine (I did lay it on thick). He got up abruptly (we were sitting outside), told me he’d never talk to me again, and drove off. I saw the man clearly, as I never had before; behind all his thought, the imperative to compete (on all levels and in all ways); the presumption of equality (misapplied to a realm in which there is no equality); and the philistinism that informs both post-modern art and rock music. America, Larsen says: more freedom, but among kiddies.

There’s an anti-climactic feel to the Grind these days. Little dramas develop, coalesce, sputter into nothing. Tensions play themselves out on subterranean levels. People don’t say too much, and what they say often amounts to a series of non sequiters. Also, the simple (but very painful) truth: I miss being young. My body of work sits on my back like Baudelaire’s chimera. It also takes the form of a long-suffering mistress, requiring sorely needed, seldom received attention. But lovers and friends and contexts also create bodies of work, and at a certain saturation point you find yourself gazing blankly at a pile of bodies. To the extent that I can tolerate the sensation, I take my scalpel to the distempered parts of all these bodies, including my own. I can do dish about all this human stuff, but then art levels squish into it and the whole thing becomes a palpitating mess. I made the choice as a young man to surround myself with artists; this is surely my just dessert. Blue icing? Sometimes. But at least as hearty as Trish’s eight thousand ways to do rice-and-vegetables.

Sauteed,
Adam

Chris McCabe (London, UK): from Zeppelins: The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express (sonnets in simultaneous time): Hightown

In a dark dark town there was a dark
dark street. Down the dark dark street
there was a dark dark pub. In the dark
dark pub there was a dark dark shelf.
On the dark dark shelf there was a book
called Competition & Monopoly. Reproduction
mustachioed Mona Lisa splattered with the
house gravy. We took an axe to the
Constitution Club. Say cheers with a Guinness
sounds like a marble medley of black
snooker balls. Twelve the maximum.
Take this cover-up on a city with issues:
Mr. Thornton with his strap-on choc cock.
In a dark dark town there was a dark dark

© Chris McCabe 2008

P.F.S. Reading Habits

The main Philly Free School participants were all idiosyncratic. Because she was a tall, leggy blonde who liked fashion (for instance), many Philadelphians would stop at the surface and assume Mary Evelyn Harju ended there. Then, they would see the paintings and make an amended judgment. Yet, the complexity and richness of Mary's character went deeper than just her paintings. Mary was an avid reader, and made a fetish of Victorian novels. Among her favorites, Wuthering Heights, which she frequently re-read, seems to have made the deepest impression on her. She approved of the Catherine Earnshaw Romantic ideal, and loved the dramatic intensity of deep-set longing and tempestuous passion. Naturally, the Bronte sisters worked for her as well, and her imaginative life was stimulated by what enchantments nineteenth century Britain had to offer, specifically for women. Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats we shared— down to the fact that Mary claimed not to understand free-verse. This meant, of course, that anything I wrote which was not strictly formalist tended to go over her head. Since her paintings were largely Renaissance-derived, from her habits I learned that the two periods— Regency/Victorian England and the Renaissance— constituted a cognitive bedrock foundation for her art and life. Texts addressing depictions of Jesus in Renaissance art were of particular interest for her. Because her imagination was fertile and she read constantly, Mary was also able to churn out first-rate academic writing when she needed to. So, the Grace Kelly veneer had much more beneath it than acquaintances thought, on this and other fronts.

As was disappointing for Mary and I, Abby Heller-Burnham was not a reader. She couldn't be— Abby was plagued with a kind of visual dyslexia which made it impossible for her to focus on texts. Numbers on pages and certain word sequences drove her crazy. When I bonded with Abs, it could be about music or her teaching me about visual art; she never showed any real interest in my writing. Fortunately, we were both absorbed in the same social nexuses and activities, including P.F.S., so I didn't notice that much. Her dedication both to French Neo-Classicism and Queer Studies was both obvious, and a unique combination.

Matt Stevenson, being an avid reader of science fiction and comic books, also had a catholic streak about literature and could enjoy anything well-written and intelligent. Thus, when I would occasionally do a reading at Tritone or the Highwire with Matt accompanying me with his keyboards/effects pedals rig, his choices, from piece to piece, were always thoughtful and germane. Matt's intelligence had a polished quality which made an amusing contrast with his ragamuffin appearance. What was habitual about Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum on these levels was a contradiction. He had an English degree from Villanova; had already founded and edited a successful literary journal ("d") from Villanova and Manayunk; and had established himself as a publishing poet on a national level, from Philadelphia. Literary jargonese was perpetually on his tongue— anaphora, enjambment, parallel structure, etc. He championed my poetry and his critiques were helpful. It's just that Jeremy had a books problem— he didn't like them very much. Pound he stuck to as to an obligation (the English department as Villanova being crammed with furious, inchoate Poundians). Yet it was impossible not to notice, as the Aughts progressed, that Jeremy's affair with literature had soured. Once the split with literature, by 2004, was made concrete, Jeremy could be seen with random, obscure texts in public (usually avant-novels in the vein of Pynchon, John Barthes, for instance) and not much else. It also needs to be stated that much of the poetry Jeremy published, in the Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere, is interesting enough to merit consideration. But when he moved to video, photography, and graphic design, the move was more or less final. He did still have a gig drafting proposals for Venturi, Scott, and Brown in Manayunk; I met Robert Venturi through him in the mid-Aughts, who even bothered to come once to a P.F.S. Highwire show; but Jeremy needed personal space around him which literature impinged upon.

I myself picked a BA and two graduate degrees in English Literature over the course of the Aughts. This meant that I was reading constantly. I managed to assimilate the entire history of poetry and literature in the English language, from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder to Tom Eliot to Thom Gunn to (Thomas) Pynchon. Yet the movement wound up being a circular one, in that I finished where I had started in the early Aughts— leaning heavily on the major English Romantics (sans Blake) and Milton, and not much else. Philosophy I had done a mountain of at PSU, with literary theory under its aegis, and a mid-Aughts foray into Deconstructionism proved fruitful, as did a lyric nod to Logical Positivism. Thousands of pages academic criticism did not leave too marked an impression, and academic scholarship ("scholarly rigor") left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, much of the time. I was also, of necessity, steeped in the work of my precise contemporaries, writers born in the 60s, 70s, and 80s; out of this arose this, P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post), and avid readers can decide for themselves how relevant this is.

Derelict Part 2: Siren's Silence

If I am going to discuss the arts journal Siren's Silence, and what it meant for Philadelphia in the Nineties, one salient point needs to be made first. Most of the dramas which lit up Siren’s Silence, both as a literary entity and as a scene, were invisible to me as a second-tier player in them. Vlad Pogorelov, Dawn Morpurgo, Lora Bloom, Christian Hand and the rest were all dramatic personalities; moreover, the social world they inhabited was a dramatic one. I was only able to see what I saw on semester breaks and visits home from State College. What, thus, I can relate about Siren's Silence, is partial and fragmentary at best. Here is the narrative of what I did see: I discovered, on a semester break, an open mike night happening at Philly Java Company on 4th Street between South and Lombard in South Philadelphia in (I think it was) spring ’97. I began attending the open mike night as regularly as I could. It became clear to me that the open mikes in the back room of Philly Java were there to represent the interests of a print arts journal called Siren’s Silence, which I became a regular contributor to. It took some time going to these open mikes to begin to differentiate personalities. The first Siren’s Silence character I noticed who made a substantial impression on me was Vladlen (“Vlad”) Pogorelov.

Vlad was different. Average height, very thin, prematurely balding, very dapper, and he talked with a thick Russian accent. The material Vlad was writing, like No. 105, which was published in ’97 in the classic chapbook Derelict, had much in common with the urban, gritty realism of Charles Bukowski, and I told Vlad as much. His signature poems were about whores, drugs, poverty, and drunkenness, and (oddly enough) they demonstrated an impressive formalist streak which (one would think) Bukowski would have hated. To hear Vlad recite, “The dirty whore/ takin a bath/ smokin crack/ singing songs from time to time” in his thick Russian brogue was a distinctly otherworldly experience. Vlad was the poetry editor of Siren’s Silence at the time. Other poems he had around, like At the Train Station, detailed a sensibility which, if a little long on adolescent romanticism, still had a flavor of imaginative decay, artful deterioration, which made them memorable to me. Oddly, Vlad sometimes appeared at Philly Java with his mother. There was talk that he had a trust fund, or was from a rich Russian family; I was never able to find out. In the intervening years, I have found ways to tip the hat to Mr. Pogorelov; in the Virtual Pinball section of Beams (“Nicanor Parra/Jimmy Page/Yossarian…”), and in Apparition Poem #509 (“on greasy days in Philadelphia…).

Lora Bloom I came to know later as the vocalist of Radio Eris, her collaboration with my own friend and future producer Matt Stevenson. Jeannine Campbell was around the Philadelphia arts scene also for many years, but we didn’t make much contact; Dawn Morpurgo same. When the final issue of Siren’s Silence was released in late ’98, which featured Clean, I happened to be home from State College, about to shift over to Manhattan, so I went. It was at Robin’s Books, on 13th Street off of Walnut, upstairs. I had seen Vlad read that spring behind Derelict at Pi on South Street in South Philly again, but Vlad wasn’t there. If my disappointment was overcome, it’s because I found a group of pick-up friends who set me up with some free Valiums. Even more serendipitous was my encounter with Matt Stevenson, who would play such a pivotal role for all of us in the Aughts. This is the truth….you must believe me. Matt needed (for some reason) a copy of the Doors first album, and I happened to have the cassette in my pocket. I handed it over to him, and thus sealed the deal that when I returned to Philadelphia a year later, after all the Manhattan Babel, pieces would fall into place which could start a revolution. Siren’s Silence advertised itself as a literary explosion; if so, the explosion cleared some crucial space (as did Jeremy's "d") for everything which followed the one century ending and the next jumping into being, from Philadelphia on out. And into 2024.

P.S. Worth noting that Siren's Silence stalwart Christian Hand attended Poetry Incarnation '05.

Preface: Derelict (1997): Vladlen Pogorelov

Whatever history books might have to say about the Nineties, it was a time marked, I felt then and still feel now, by a spirit of unity which prevailed among the youth population of the United States. From the Alternative Revolution in popular music (and attendant spectacles, like Lollapalooza) to a revolution in fashion which favored androgyny and made bisexuality and gayness hip, Nineties kids often led lives joined together by golden threads— shared pastimes and experiences which made their lives workable. Such was my life, too. So, the night in April 1997 when I walked into the Philly Java Company in South Philadelphia and was told that, as was serendipitous for me, a reading was going on in the comfortably furnished back room, a new golden thread sewed together the beginnings of another chapter in my life as a nascent poet. One that followed me, also, back to State College.

The reading was, of course, hinged to the Nineties Philadelphia poetry journal Siren’s Silence. More than just a journal which published edgy, avant-garde leaning poetry and visual art (evincing, also, a prescient sense of multi-media), Siren’s Silence embodied a sharply defined ethos— live fast, live hard, and live like you mean it. Of all the characters I chanced to meet from the Siren’s Silence crowd in ’97 and ’98, Vlad(len) Pogorelov was the most memorable. When his first collection appeared in ’97, Derelict, which you have here in your hands, it consolidated for me that Vlad was more than just a poet of note; he was the first poet in my age group (slightly older) to manifest and sustain a compelling voice for the length of a book. “At the Train Station” was, and remains, my personal favorite— a poem convincingly personal, convincingly sensual, provocative, but also (as is important) not afraid to take the English language and make it sing, man. Because Vlad hailed from another country, he might not have realized what I knew then, and remember now— the entire twentieth century had passed, both in the United States and Europe, in which all the spark, all the musicality had been drained out of English-language poetry and poetic language, and been replaced with something very cold, very flat. Dull. Vlad sang with passion, at the top of his lungs, and instinctively employed, both in “Train Station” and elsewhere, all the seductive tricks of lyricism, as American poetry had buried— rhyme, near-rhyme, assonance. Such music even Whitman never knew.

I was reminded, also, of Charles Bukowski by Derelict, with its gritty realism and emphasis on subterranean urban life— dirty whores, drunkenness, poverty. The protagonist of Derelict and the protagonist of Bukowski’s poetry share many complexes, impulses, neuroses, and tastes, from a love of classical music to a distaste for the mainstream of human life in general. In fact, it wasn’t always easy to ascertain then, during the Derelict era of the late Nineties, and as an aspiring poet myself, to what extent Mr. Pogorelov wanted to remain in the margins. By late ’98, he had packed up all his things and moved to the West Coast, leaving Philadelphia without making too full of an impression, as I moved to Manhattan from State College and then hop-scotched back to Philly. Was the warm, cozy ending of “No. 103” really indicative— is this a literary protagonist who could master his demons? And where did Mr. Pogorelov separate from the protagonist in his best poems, like “103” (an issue which reaches past Bukowski, down centuries, to Byron and out)? In those days, I thought I would never know; yet now I do, as Vlad reappears to reclaim what’s his. The ultimate demon, as we read in Derelict, is time itself— wearing us down, taking our epiphanies and making them both feel and appear worthless. Now that the time has come for Derelict to emerge again, a flagship Nineties literary talisman reborn, we see exactly who Vladlen Pogorelov is— not only a good, strong, solid, authentic poet, but a poet who means it, man. And there are never many of those around.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): Letters to Dead Masters: #27

George,

I am overhearing Tibby talk to one of his fiction-writing friends on his cell-phone. The subject of his phone-call is “falls from grace”— who’s fallen, who hasn’t. In literature, there are any number of ways to fall— you can publish the wrong things at the wrong time, be too famous or not famous enough, shoot too many arrows at too many moving targets or forget to defend yourself. Tibby happens to be discussing the arrow-shooters; guys who create toxic social contexts and destroy themselves in the process. Ironically, this is precisely how I perceive Tibby. “With guys like this, you just have to walk away,” he says. Tibby, as usual, projects onto other artists what he doesn’t want to see in himself; but I see Tibby’ projection as representative of a larger problem. To put the matter bluntly, artists in 2010 America have largely gone Republican, owing to the subconscious influence of one Dick Cheney (pants-wearer) and his jack George W. Bush. The Republican syndrome in American artists manifests in two ways: 1) an inability to see art in any but the most crassly competitive terms, and 2) a complete and totalized unwillingness to change on any level. This widely manifested syndrome has turned the arts, willy-nilly, into a charnel ground; a damned, God-forsaken locale. The cruel irony is that a majority of artists (like Tibby) consider themselves to be liberal. It’s a generation sickness that spans three generations; and it makes mince-meat of any American “ideals” that artists could think to propagate. Heather Mullen’s nightmare. Tibby and I do small-talk, and the subtext never changes; he pretends to know less about myself and my work than he actually does. His biz is parasitic and voyeuristic. Yawn.

I just had to repel a kind of attack. A tall, thin, balding guy in his (I’m guessing) fifties with a moustache and a plethora of arm-tattoos invited himself to sit down at my table and smoke a cigarette. I put him off by telling him I’m “working.” I am, and part of my work is digging through the “Fall Arts” issue of one of the weekly free shit-rags. I’m stunned: there’s no literature in this at all. It’s all theater, painting, pop music. Philly is, after all, a fiercely illiterate city. People here pride themselves on what (and how much) they don’t know. And here comes Tibby again, and it looks like he’s got big news. It is this: one of his friends (an NYC guy) scored a movie deal with his latest opus. Of course, this is something I have no chance of competing with. Tibby presents the data to me as a fait accompli, but I know that most movie deals fall through. Tibby’s two objectives: to fill up his accustomed vacuum of hollow space (he’s not writing, scrounging, wife preggers) and to make me feel as small and worthless as possible. If I have an objective, it’s only to gather anecdotes towards a comprehensive summary of human foibles. I’m willing to be complicit with Tibby: I flinch at apropos moments. Tibby, incidentally, carries his body like a befuddled twelve-year-old forced to carry six feet and one-hundred seventy pounds. His wardrobe evinces hipsterism reduced to bare essentials— faded blue-jeans, tight tee-shirt. His speech conveys the know-it-all assurance of burgeoning adolescence. In other words, he’s a man-child. The DJs aren’t that different; immaturity, after all, fuels the cheap competitiveness and totalized stasis that have made a charnel ground of this place, too. Interactions like this used to shake me; but when you begin to look beyond yourself, they become easier to bear. For the real players, there are even interesting levels to self-absorption— you are absorbed in yourself, while also engaged in acts of self -transcendence. In this mode, you can get past button-pushing and see into the life of things. Tibby thinks that writing a novel is just pushing buttons— here’s something that looks symbolic, something that seems penetrating, something with “universal resonance.” He’s a show-off, fishing for praise. Vast, mighty, ephemeral careers have been built from button-pushing. Real literature erupts when an artist starts to fumble— Audrey Cope said that. It’s fun to do these arabesques while waiting to see if Dana eventually shows up (I still don’t have her cell number). Sometimes I feel like tossing my entire enterprise aside just to gawk at the sky. The Grind could use a little sky in it.

Well, Dana finally showed up alright. She was a little off-kilter, a little askew, and also a little mischievous. A bunch of whispered conversations ensued, and, from a gesture Kris made, I sussed what the point must’ve been— Dana is coyly leading everyone who needs to know to believe that she just gave one of the DJs a blowjob. Sigh. Am I a little tender, about this stuff? Yeah. Julie Hayes once claimed to have given twenty guys blowjobs over the course of one summer. Guys who will never eat, I trust, desert mushrooms again. Yikes. Well, get over it. She probably just sold him some dope. Who knows? I hope she really did it. Once again, I do the yeoman’s task of walking in the park, dancing in the dark, and reminiscing. To me (I say, to the assembled throng of 19th century bards), Heather Mullen (her again) was always the quintessential Master of Disaster (MOD) around fellatio; was, in fact, a High Mod. She thus displayed mastery of craft-skills related to fellatio and emotional dispossession, streams of consciousness, skewered perspectives, not to mention an artful sense of fracturing. It remains to be seen, I incise spitefully, if Dana displays such mastery. Inbuilt also, for Ms. Mullen: the deconstructive impulse, the definitive conviction that “there is nothing outside the sex.” That’s the thesis of Equations, anyway, right? Not to mention Reception Velocity, like on the Internet. The irony of the High Mod girl; she sucks.

Deep in my own desert mushroom trance, I can’t not hit Trish again. Killer instincts aside, Trish’s hardcore fellatio Romanticism was about an ideal, a belief; that we were two souls interlocked, moving through our private and privatized universe together. Sincerely. And she was wildly lyrical, orally. She found me mad, bad, and dangerous to blow; but it worked. The music was electric. Trish was Psyche, she was Helen, she was Penelope. Not to mention Venus, Athena, Maud Gonne, Fanny Brawne. And Traci Lords. Phantasmagoric, in a way that Heather Mullen could never be; but short, as it were on irony. Dana Blasconi need not apply.

Sky-Clad,

Steve Halle (Palatine, Illinois, USA): Blackbirds (finale)

yoga for insomnia, yoga for narcolepsy

so much for the Hippocratic oath

nutritionists and fashionistas
become unarmed Sandinistas
teach the populace to toggle
between adoration and revulsion:
a waif-like waist line
or Anna Nicole’s Olympian bust line?

some of the chosen
merely sit & breathe
while others bustle
over concrete shapes
of themselves or relatives
frozen in a blast
of furnace ash

journeyman doctors
reach the end
of the mind and find
Tiresias but no palm
empty pillboxes but
no donkey, no praise
of no immortal soul

sing softly until I end

my song never
reaches top forty

neither Anna Nicole
nor Kate Moss
will ever love
me, neither, in life
nor in death

regard the posture:
posture is all posturing

on the Big Time Dating Show Leading Always to Sex,
Tiresias waits
behind the silk curtain
with a copper coffer
containing a self-devouring snake,
all sinew and shimmering scale

for the next Oprah

after choosing a mate,
Tiresias lounges
beneath Egyptian cotton longing
for the androgynous
mate who has slipped into
something more
comfortable

& old body parts
hidden like lotus petals unfold
hormonally altered by pills
his beauty half-withered
her member half-hard

Postscript

Money’s better.
Car’s on the fritz.
Selling a kidney.
Explain later…

Vlad Pogorelov (Rocklin, California, USA): from Derelict: Under Those Roofs (a children's poem for grown-ups)

For C. Hewins

A city with three million roofs
Was fifty miles wide
Somewhere under those roofs
They had a place to hide

He— was a man
Or maybe a boy,
Or maybe he was a she
It’s not important who he was
We never met for tea

He had his roof,
He had his floor,
Besides he had a cat
And when the day would go to sleep
They would both go to bed

She— had a room
Under the roof
And underneath the floor
The roofs had the color of the sun,
The spider and the moon

We met that night
I saw the sun, the spider
And the moon
And since I was there by myself
She let me see some more
And then I saw myself and her
Both laying on the floor
Under the colors of the sun,
The spider and the moon
And when I left her she was asleep
We never met again

Tired
Happy
Loved
She was laying
On her back
She didn’t moan anymore, and yet
She was alive
Wrapped in the pleasures of her dreams
Of a dying candlelight

He— thought of a wife
He never had,
Of children who are not there
And then he lighted a cigarette
To drive away the despair
And it was quiet outside
“It must be night,” he said,
Life is too short
The nights are long
Its time to be in bed

He petted his cat,
He brushed his teeth,
And finally went to sleep
I hope, maybe in his dreams
His soul will not weep

She was asleep
A long time ago
The time was passing by
And though they never met each other
They’d never say “Good-bye”

A city with three million roofs
Is fifty miles wide
Somewhere under those roofs
We all have a place to hide

© Vlad Pogorelov 1997

P.F.S. Post