Fixed-Explosive

New Spring Intertron Publications

2011-05-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

Check out the new issue of jellyroll

and the new issue of blazeVOX

also, Sun's Skeleton has a spiffy new website with some excerpts from our latest issue

Enjoy!

Reading at Site Fest

2011-02-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

This Sunday, March 6th, I'll be reading at Northeast Kingdom as part of Site Festival 2011. There's going to be lots of wonderful stuff going on (including the music of Jo Body Morris and the poetry of Tony Iantosca among others) so, ya know, be there or be square.

Variations on The Lobster

2011-02-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

Its bowtie askew,

it fires into the air.

The lobster's moribund wounds

number googolplex.

Where there would be a mouth, you open

a window. "Welcome to the deep blue

sea!" it says where it seems there should

be hot cobbler cooling on the sill.

The lobster takes its time

to the bubblebath. Autographs

birthday cards and fortune cookie

fortunes. Ferrari colored words.

A single stalactite hangs from the birthing

fluid of a true-to-life scenario.

Meat, potatoes, carrots, spices.

Tired of feeling all these

ways, is it too much to ask

for a lobster on a length of ruby

red ribbon? A gleaming thing

circumvents radar, the way I lose

track of my third eye while caring

for fragile anxious teenagers.

When yawning, say "banana skins."

Watch the visual and aural realms merge

and sever like single-celled things.

Banana skins. The lobster

smokes banana skins.

Use what you're handed not like

a funicular to raise yourself to the pasty

peaks, nor like an instruction manual

for operating factory fresh circus stilts,

but like what? A citrus stone?

The seething tide of diversions grows

engorged, and that's ok I guess, so you can

feel another way that may be novel or may lead

you in circles along the circuit around

the clocktower of morning's windowpane

dreams. The lobster repeats slogans

of youth television. Yet he seems

so serious when brushing his teeth.

Sometimes a sad face gets inside

and the small shrubs wilt.

Since we last spoke...

2011-02-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Long time gone since the last episode of bloggerdom.

Current Events:

Barnstorm, the wonderful online publication from the University of New Hampshire, has published my poem, Over and Over As I Wake, which you can find here.

The new issue of Sun's Skeleton, which us editors and productioneers have been assiduously constructing, is nearing the final stages of development and is soon to hit the streets. We also have a brand new website so check it out, and reserve your copy now!

excerpts from Spaceman's Childhood Fantasia

2010-09-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Pataphysical Freak Out MU!

Orienting stargaze clouds and un-

clouds his looking glass seeing

himself in tight silver jeans on

a stage of six dimensions (the others

still being dis- or un- covered)

cosmic debris a shaft of light

in his pants in the vaulted heavens as

above so bellow the MUUUUUUU

whale song dust song phantasm

song in pink lady lemonade night on the mountain

on the corner on the white bulb lit stage the women of beer

an cigarettes flail lying on their backs in bright black t-shirts

and bright black jeans lying on their backs on the bright black

voice of roaring electric amplified

St. Captain Freakout and the Magic Bamboo Request

The first time Spaceman

saw real bamboo it looked

fake to him. Must have been

in New Jersey. Before the extra-terrestrial

ventures. Before the tetradecahedron

and the sanctity of circles, the too many

unpronounceables. It was like a movie.

The trembling leaves. The mid-summer light.

Ambient sound of cicadas and sixteen-wheelers.

The stillness foreshadowing the flight

of innocence. He thought of the significance

of an occurrence in a life.

He thought of things he would know

someday but didn't know yet.

Panda bears and the paper

placemats of Japanese restaurants.

Distance. Those sharp

green leaves. New Jersey.

A Thousand Shades of Grey

You could cover the distance between

now and a memory

You could walk that path through

the woods

You could be

Spaceman you could be lost

Distance is as sure a thing meeting

you from the boom box

A flower past bloom in that

handshake any flower no

flower at all arrive at the coast

Spaceman sing Pink Lady Lemonade

Sing In E just so long as you go

out singing

You watch the gulls on the edge of the sea

imagine the edge of what you're seeing

As your gaze rows

toward it rowing in

Rowboat flower song isn't it

enough that distance

between each word each tone

you could walk that

path row that boat

Splendor Mystic Solis

Lonely green

meadows clothed

in yellow

dandelions.

Simultaneously,

gleaming silver

robotic bodies

mirror studded

the size of wild

rodents roving.

Parables

of the search

for home or

authenticity writ

large in the clouds.

Splace in

stock footage

of the cosmos

in a grain

of sand

at will.

You Are The Moonshine

A big cold hole in the dark denim night

a big fat zero of light if light could be said

to be the medium through which one object becomes

known to another through which one object becomes

one object if it could be an incalculable quantity

flung carelessly calibrated distances into newborn

hands if the heavens could be courtmartialed into centimeters

of jelly flesh if mirror upon mirror upon mirror could look

upon each other's eyes then Spaceman somehow

smoking on the brick-cloistered lawns of youth a vague colorless

but seen there a purple flower introduced to a wide-angled

sea of mirrors a panoramic snapshot color smoke when

you wish upon a star yes spacedust

the firmament and all isn't it enough

to know we're all spacedust?

Isn't it enough to know it's all spacedust?

You are real as a fact I neither see nor feel

Spaceman is composed by such information

Spaceman is manufactured in a kind of retinal

metaphor he lays illumined by reflections

he follows a trail of light all the way home a handful

of spacedust and light singing moon moon moon

Reading at Flowering Inconsistencies V

2010-07-20T15:04:00.001-07:00

This Thursday, July 22nd, I'll be reading from the new Spaceman's Childhood Fantasia serial poem at Flowering Inconsistencies V, hosted by Northeast Kingdom in Bushwick. If you're in the area, drop by why-don'tcha and enjoy poetry musics and dramatics!

And Wordless, He Comes To Sleep

2010-07-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

A forgetting. A wash of brackish

water. The deeds of one's youth, pennies on one's pocket

could come out in the wash. Could be made a wish.

Shopping malls tower above this example.

Remember each particle of gravel, your feet tread

the white line 'tween here and the calendar, a pebble of sand

worms into your shoes. Raw carrion on hooks. To market,

a conference of motors, a goat bleat din. Tomorrow's pizza party

hangs on the edge of a discus. Thus and thusly. Any glass

could be used as a lens, any wall could prop a clock.

Sound and sense linger long after the other guests have left.

Stoic faces, the pop and flash of a camera before

our time. Cross another item off the list.

Those high cheek bones, that posture, so becoming of a diary

entry. So little separates us from the frames of ourselves.

A pause going into the last deep tone.

From Here To There

2010-07-20T14:29:00.001-07:00

Now he reads only yellow literature. The season

for hot toddies has long passed, like a blimp trailing

promises for a bounteous future. One day at a time.

Locate yourself on the timeline using a complex system

of algorithms. Throw the darts until your turn is over,

snakeskin boots come back in style, frost crinkles white the grass.

An inhospitable gaze is currently unexcused, which isn't to say

inexcusable. It is mute. It smells like cinnamon gum

right now. The night bird on Eckford Street comes back

in the guise of a woman in a grey work shirt. Obviously,

it's springtime. In a similar fashion, a subway car bears us

from here to there like a day's box on a calendar come unglued.

The want to handfeed the color yellow into the woman's eyes

is a perfectly natural desire like thirst. Someone take

all this agency from me, I'll just squander

it. While away the summer. A waste of time

burns on the lawn of the ages, while little squirrels

pursuit each other up a tree.

Know All The Contemptible And The Mediocre

2010-06-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

Or to pull your chair up to the set table, following
the migratory patterns of ghosts, ringtone
set to the music of contemplation, a 5-tone scale
like the rungs of a ladder laid against the living room wall.

Trying to leave my body once, I stumbled on all the jagged
names protruding from my flesh. Less than refined.
It is clearly written, little brother. Study carefully
the literary teaching of a good person long ago.
You must understand the reason of the contemptible, ultimately
have no connection, understand the mediocre.

There are many forms of grace, not excluding stumbling,
using one's hands to eat, trying to use language
as a wick. Still, it is stumbling. The ghosts
fog the kitchen window.

Just think: all of the emotions in your pocket
put together are lost in the shine
of an old song. It is a form of indifference
carrying the water of the ages on its shoulders.

Up the mountain, down the mountain. The metaphors
pile up like unread mail until something collapses,
the telephone rings,
the empty pockets are tied into white knots,
and wine stains the carpet.

The vague sensation of wanting something enters
the porous space around the flesh, scaling.

To Make Work

2010-05-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

To sit down and do what everyone has done.

To stand up and do it.

To follow tracks in the sand

laid by the wandering jerboa. To make child

to make child. My brother donned robes

to take a bite out of desire. I find this

noble. After all, the cartoon characters of our youth

had prepared us for this. The Joy of Sex, The Cloud

of Unknowing. For each step there is

a manual. For each manual a skein

of yarn unwinding. Commitments to ourselves,

to the world around us, blow around in the wind like yesterday's

newspapers. I take my pen to the page and record

what the ticking clock says to the ancient

fate. A hero trembles in his ordinary

shoes, turns the page.

Springtime

2010-04-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, babies and buttercups it's that time of the year again. Living things sprouting from the ground, green things, rooftop shenanigans, birdsongs, leisurely strolls and bike rides, and the resounding ritual call of the Mister Softee truck. Here are some new poems heralding the arrival of another spring in our corner of planet earth.

Early Spring, Coming Up From the R Train

A woman walks through a square of sun

up the brick stairs into a Renaissance ideal

of the mystery of grace, divine or otherwise.

Regardless, the square resembles the perfect

squares of apartment shadows. The grids of modern

life, chessboards, ouija boards, micro-processors.

As above, so below, they say and have said since

the Sumerians lay thought to shape and shape

to clay. The city's ode to symmetry, alternating

squares and rectangles, each block already

set up, framed, ready to be bought and hung up

on the wall. All of our walking is done

through these gates, in these angular pastures.

At the Xing Long Coffee Shop, the woman asks,

"you want lunchee?" The usual. Regular day

with all of history propping it up like steel beams.

Cartons of milk are delivered. The morning paper

languishes on a table. Something like someone's

ideal of grace, born somewhere along the continuum,

rises and falls like a baseball card attached

to a bike wheel's spoke in the afternoon light.

Spring Poem with a View of the Brooklyn Bridge

The sun comes erasing

everything

that's come before.

Joy!

A space filled

with iron and brick

that trellised weight

symmetry and stillness full of light

Before: work, sleep, millennia

like rows of corn swaying

in a patriot's dream of a long lost

homeland. Afterwards, what else,

much of the same.

For now, pigeons peck at fresh bits of hot dog buns.

People practice handstands in the grass.

A baby chews on the plastic lid of a to-go cup.

The sun comes making babes of us all. Rejoice!

Gum the textures of a world of old bridges,

nationstates, pink erasers, variable light, and

other things too much to bear.

Spring Light in the North Country

Helter skelter, the worm pirouettes from the earth.

Although in full light of sun, shadows at hand.

Waiting in the wings, as they say. (and aren't they

always? Threatening to take back what they've lost)

Nevertheless, earthworm glistens. Dance of things

resumes a daily practice after the snowthaw.

To think, all winter, these voices not gone

but swallowed in the shade of a cloud. A white cloud,

a long grey shadow laid.

All that dim white gleam. Months of grinding

your teeth into harmless stones. Flat

as windowight. Then the brook pipes up.

Babbling, baubling, burbling. Ah-hem. We now

resume our regularly scheduled bird calling.

I'll call that pennywhistle staccato. Nicklecandy bin rustle

(which, were we to think of Arabic, names the bird "nicklecandy, son

of rustle," which, were we to look straight down the barrel of a spring day,

unsparingly, could apply to whatever else comes crawling out

of a long silence).

Morning scratcher. Flittering dark hood with its white belly sheen.

Snipped by yellowbeak, earthworm dissembled.

Ah, grace of aerial creatures. Fate of homecoming

ballerinas. Morning snack.

Flatulence of a spring day want met.

Reading at Hearth Gods

2010-04-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

For those in the NYC Metro Area, I'll be reading at Hearth Gods this Saturday evening. The event starts around 9 PM and takes place in the back room at Jimmy's No. 43, 43 E. 7th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.

Do come and enjoy yourself.

Pitcher Plants

2010-04-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Green within. Nectar bribe luring flies

to feed. This abyss we fill

with a substance like longing. Bare inner walls

hankering for hunger. Anxious

to feed this abyss. We fill

this carbon vessel, this empty belly,

hankering for hunger, anxious.

Attempts to amend this gaping yawn,

this carbon vessel, this empty belly.

Heat in the marsh mirages sight,

attempts to amend this gaping yawn,

these green walls patterned with red veins.

Heat in the marsh mirages sight

and a swarm of flies hovers just above

these green walls patterned with red veins,

plunging one by one into the void.

And a swarm of flies hovers just above

plunging one by one into the mouth,

plunging one by one into the void,

swallowed by the clear waters.

Plunging one by one into the mouth,

how we make sense of this or other matters,

swallowed by the clear waters,

the glacial mechanics of digestion.

How we make sense of this or other matters

with a substance like longing. Bare inner walls,

the glacial mechanics of digestion,

green within. Nectar bribe luring flies.

Golden Lucky Cat

2010-03-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

The new year comes and goes littering the streets

with confetti. We barely understand, the primacy

of the color red, the nature of the project shiny.

It's all veneer, inherently a glimmer. So close

to death and even closer to the denial

of death. As the mud-splattered urchin sticks

his tongue out, hurling hand-crafted mudcakes into the empty

outside where the misread ocean forms shapes--curlicues

and arabesques, gewgaws and flash--consequently

shaping forms just out of sight like the spider's web

spangling its diamond patterns above the doorway.

As you walk the pavement, accidents barely averted

multiply until you find you are walking a narrow path

through sopping overgrowth. It is dark. Nowhere to go but onward

No map but the memory of spring flowers, the wasp stings

and improvised dances of childhood. Traveller, may you be blessed

with heaping sacks of gold coin and a friendly destiny.

In another life, who knows, you could have been

a census taker in Death Valley or a bank teller

in the long autumn of empire's decline.

Ah, Golden Lucky Cat,

may this year be as sweet as the sugared coconut

shavings spilt on the bakery floor. May bridges trundle

between islands like non-committal handshakes on

a commuter train. A smooth bland homecoming

is the most we can ask for our loved ones

at sea. Golden Lucky Cat, light the way to

prosperity with your dumb bared teeth.

Borders Crossed

2010-03-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

noon roves from horizon to horizon slapdash

as homeless feelings leave handprint

smudges on the windowpane that

reappear perpetually when condensation

wets the glass a recurrence of weather

that turns and shimmies like a dance that

comes in and out of style over the ages

and the tire's rubber that once made circles

in the ocean turns and shimmies under

its tonnage of Honduran bananas

Meanwhile the minute hand runs

its laps hungering its own tail the project

of forgetting becomes more and more

dire as each moment rears and collapses

on itself frothing sea mist that prism-like

is a lens in which colors bend recalled

conversations reconstitute themselves in novel

timbres whole vistas take on different hues as

if playing dress up before a mirror

The sea never having regarded itself

as metaphor becomes cold and distant as

you frame it so it goes There

a school of clocks crest the tide

like boogie boards with each further

imitation fidelity to the master copy

weakens and all we have to work and play

with is semblance miming semblance

approximate feelings in the tide pool among

mollusks you can collect when they beach

and dry and rattle in your pocket walking

the tight rope from here to home

Remember the painter who unravelled

his whole life inland painting portraits of the sea

he is a mirror fogged by warm breath like this

we deny disguise artifice changing the lyrics

to match what we hear of the song

An Hour's Walk from Kathmandu

2010-02-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

For Jon

My brother picking ripe basil from the community garden, Johnson, watched in the new summer
by the emptiness where the snowy owl once perched in January snow watching from its perch
atop the green toolshed. Rustle of green among the quiet and a taste of snow-thaw
in the shining leaves. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes. Folds his thoughts into the origami
shapes of maybe mispronounced Tibetan syllables. Flies with the owl, is still with the owl, and unflies
and unstills, not-owl, not-basil, not-morning wiping away the dust from the mirror.

*

Original face

*

Waking in the blue of dawn's first crest to chant and sit, sit and chant. There are birds I can't name
and a vista I can't name and a world I can't name singing behind the temple walls. He will wear
the dawn through all the day, the way a laughingthrush wears its plumage. He will sit in the dawn
until it is not dawn and still he will sit in the dawn. Opening his eyes and closing his eyes and breathing.

*

Show your original face

*

He is on the couch now, watching Full House, absorbed. Canned laughter and mute afternoon
light fill the room. Sensation itself, as deep and perilous as the sea, as a neighbor's voice through the
window. He is opening and closing his eyes and breathing. Gauged by our vagabond thoughts, there is
so much or so little to each fraction of a second. He knows this, doesn't know it, will know it,
will not know it. He floats along.

*

Show me your original face

*

Mud and clay is metaphor. Flesh and blood, neuron and synapse, metaphor as well. First there is
a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. And then there isn't again. Or is there?
His voice, a frequency bounding and rebounding through fathoms of space, sounds healthy and relaxed.
Healthy and relaxed, my reception of his voice, a brief presence surrounded by chatter, din of motors
and wheels that may as well be wings of enormous butterflies or machines threshing wheat for all I
know. He is busy with a small task. With a great weight. With an airy burden. Taking a thought
and whittling and whittling until there is nothing but two hands and a blade. No, not that either.

Horseshoe Crabs

2010-02-13T22:28:00.001-08:00

Lost in the pink jags, coral shallows. I couldn't reach
you, couldn't see. Paddling after you, stilled by currents,
the last time I saw you, across the platform, eclipsed and unveiled by passing trains,
wearing a jester's mask of expressions, I disappeared inside

you, couldn't see. Paddling after you, stilled by currents,
you were eclipsed by shoals of silver fish and seaweed,
wearing a jester's mask of expressions, I disappeared inside
the window's view of tunnel walls, like night swimming.

You were eclipsed by shoals of silver fish and seaweed,
the ocean lapped dizzy, salt breath.
The window's view of tunnel walls, like night. Swimming
unalone and solitary as only in an ocean,

the ocean lapped dizzy. Salt breath
of goodbye in the subway station. Only Brooklyn strangers again,
unalone and solitary as only in an ocean.
Thought of the sea beneath the rails, the seaweed scent of tears,

of goodbye in the subway station. Only Brooklyn strangers. Again,
without caress. Two horseshoe crabs in a muddy shallow.
Thought of the sea. Beneath the rails, the seaweed scent of tears,
cerulean of goodbye gaze lost in tunnels

without caress. Two horseshoe crabs in a muddy shallow.
The last time I saw you, across the platform, eclipsed and unveiled by passing trains,
cerulean of goodbye, gaze lost in tunnels,
lost in the pink jags, corral shallows, I couldn't reach.

Textures of Certain Nights

2010-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway..."--Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D

1
I imagine telling you about textures
and colors of certain nights I remember,
as if describing a painting I would never know
how to make. But sometimes silence is the only way to talk.
It's been raining all day, and I want to describe
the figure standing beneath the awning, rain shuddering
down the roof between us so he or she is only a blur
between the streaks of rain, but there is no one there.
My midnight, your afternoon.
Your far away afternoon.
No moonlight on my hands.

2
There are no footsteps in the blue snow.
Only circles the color of waxed peaches
where the streetlamps' glow touches ground.
Like crude maps of time, imperfect circles, still
and slowly eroding. You watch those winter colors
from a second-story window. Before sleep comes,
before the last sips of red wine,
white stars of frost on the glass pane.

3
Some nights are so hollow,
we wonder if they ever took place.
How many times have we seen moonlight
clarify what it touches? How many times
have we seen nothing, the night
a shadow, dark net over a dark sea?
If I remember the bruised purple
sky of a distant summer,
the silhouette of your body lying
on a rock beside a lake,
how many forgotten nights
convene in that memory?

4
The curtains hide the night,
and the whole world is outside of every room.
Sky of white ash, your body assumes
the form of a question. And the pines' dark ribs, distinct
in all that white, are simple and numb.
I remember the fondness I held
for those shapes that refuse
to let go of their color. That dissonance.

5
A man passes on a bike,
holding a worn machete in his hands.
He pedals down the rust-red gravel
and is gone. The rain has ended. The phrase
is finished before the words are spoken.
All that we've forgotten and all we've left
unsaid, all those seasons,
will continue to bear us.
My midnight, your afternoon.
The moonlight on my hands,
wakeful as a mosquito.

Durian

2010-02-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

The morning water, its closing
around me offers
more than a distraction.
A thousand points of light
and I am inside. Where
do I want to go?

Once, I cut my teeth on lakes, and now
the mornings come earlier and sleep is
a transparency. Night's projector,
humming bumblebee. The image
and its shadow on the wall.

When I knocked on your door and no one answered
but the cluck of knuckles on wood, the water
came to my ankles and then to my thighs,

and before I knew it, what I had wanted to ask
you fell beneath the undertow and I could not
retrieve it. This sharp weight in my hands.
This new mortgage of youth. No one answered.

And the paperwork signed on the wooden planks of the dock,
cobwebbed in its filing cabinet, where no one thinks of it.
A new kind of light touches a new kind of water.
Opening one's eyes beneath the lake's surface,
forgetting what one came for and taking what's found.
Only a taste. Only to see for one's self.

In the Jungle

2010-01-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

When I first saw it in their hands,
the bird's beak opened and closed,
motion automatic as dreaming,
and the sound of it a dry reed.
The old woman in a shroud of clove
smoke, darkening with the light left.
The children stroking the feathers
like a lucky stone, almost dropping
the poor thing. And the price
of rubber is falling, what can we do
about it? Everyone wants to know,
what can we do?

*

It's taken this long to think of how long it's been.
Not a letter in weeks with pictures of an autumn
or snow or trolley cars. You can remember
everything, but you can't have it. Not again.
And there's a mobil hung from the ends of the calendar,
the shapes ordinary but seen as through a sooty
periscope. Among the background noise
someone is playing a blues, leaf-crackle,
minor-thirds, photographs of the places
we've moved out of, still holding our bookshelves,
dirty plates, scissors, a few half-burnt candles
on the kitchen table. And no one there to claim them.
So sing it.

*

Now it is raining again and it's all
I can hear. Not wanting to cancel
our plans, we wait. Smoke rising
from my mouth like a flock of stray birds.
In a closed room, the only thing it seeks
is the drafty edges of a window pane.
Like the famous ghosts who've left their statues
alone. Trying to find a way through
the overgrowth. Ancients wandering
the humid air. We breathe. The lights go out
so we burn candles. In the morning,
I make phone calls overseas, try to sort things out.

*

Red smoldering horizon's edge.
Skin scraped away by asphalt,
ragged. Coming down the mountain,
I found myself in the dirt, bleeding.
If you are lucky enough to see yourself
in the mirror, then you know that taste.
Salt-lick of longing. The little lizards
on the wall, scavenging meals.
I could write a pop song or a technical manual
on ventriloquism, it'd be the same in the end.
Always cicadas, unseen in the tree bark,
mating songs like a quilt of motors running, harsh enough,
loud enough to lie beneath. Scrape of wings.