I want to thank all the wonderful poets who allowed us to post their poetry on Arthur while I was the Poetics Editor. I had a wonderful time reading the work and comments and helping bring a poetic flavor to the content posted here. Many people asked me how I was chosen for this position and I tell them it was my resume. When asked to provide more color I refer them to my resume which I’ve posted here.

Thanks to everyone for a great ride into the world of Arthur poetry.

Travis Catsull

My Resume

Objective

To use my skills for an aware and growing company and inspire my co-workers with strong work ethic and friendly attitude.

Experience

Lawn Service: Just like every kid I went around to different houses asking if I could mow their lawn for a few bucks.

Auction Ring: I’d deliver food and drinks to cowboys for tips while they worked cattle in the hot pens all day. Once I was on the catwalk and tossed a can of soda to one of the men, but I didn’t throw it far enough and it bounced off a steel bar and hit the man in the face. Blood gushed from his eye and it started swelling. He insisted it was okay, but didn’t tip me.

Door to Door Salesman: Sold greeting cards and cans of cookies from a catalogue in my neighborhood, but forgot to write down who’d ordered what and my grandmother had to go to every house with me and explain what happened.

Lone Star BBQ: While my boss was teaching me the correct way to cut brisket he told me he shot his father to death.

David’s Grocery: My friend, Jordan, used to get blow-jobs from the check-out girls behind pallets of soda while I restocked shelves.

Lakeside Advertising: Sold ad space to various businesses, but forgot to turn in the checks one day, lost them and never went back to work.

Construction: Wired houses with this old man until he started hitting on my mom.

Champions Putt-putt and Batting Cages: Was fired because I was the only one on duty and was in the batting cages when a bunch of my friends broke into the office and stole $80 in video tokens. My boss showed up, drunk, as this was happening and fired me on the spot.

Firewood Supplier: Cut down trees with a chainsaw, split wood and went with the boss to different BBQ joints in Houston to sell the wood, unload it and stack it in the back.

Movie theatre: After 4 months they changed management and I didn’t like the new people and was tired of working at a movie theatre, so I stole a 5 gallon bucket of movie trailers and left.

Lifeguard: My friend’s mother managed a country club and even though I had no idea about CPR or how to save anyone I worked two days a week until they replaced me with a trained person.

China Buffet: Was a waiter at this buffet place until Sung, the owner, cheated me out of $50. It was a great joke that every week on the work schedule he spelled Wednesday “Weeday”.

Merrill Lynch: Was PBX operator and was responsible for every incoming call going to 400 employees. I lasted a week.

Farm Hand: With a hand hook I’d toss square bales of hay onto the back of a moving truck in the sun for 10 hours a day at .10 cents a bail.

Subway Sandwiches: Was a “sandwich artist” until the boss found out after I’d close up me and a bunch of friends would play hockey in the parking lot, make outrageous sandwiches, drink beer and fill “free sandwich” cards with those yellow stamps.

M.A.R.C: Was an award winning telemarketer and donated plasma for extra cash after my shift since the blood bank was next door.

Flying Tomato: Was fired after cutting through the customer’s lawn on the way to their home to deliver a stuffed pizza. I was also on acid.

Data One: Listened to headphones while entering thousands and thousands of warranty documents from Honda. I lasted a month.

Drug Dealer: Sold acid for college book money after I spent my Pell grant on an electric guitar and a new stereo. Most of my customers were on the football team.

Mechanic’s Assistant: Changed oil in cars, swept the garage, sorted nuts and bolts and put away tools while the mechanics stood around and drank Keystone.

AMC Theatre: My manager was a lesbian nazi woman who when I didn’t hang the marquee letters just right she yelled at me so I quit.

Dr Pepper/7Up Corp.: Was administrative assistant to the Sr. VP of Marketing and did nothing except read and write stories about how shitty corporations were.

Farm Hand: Planted potatoes, cut trees for fence posts and repainted a tractor all in the name of Krishna and the chance to study a different religion.

Blue Cross/ Blue Shield: Transcribed medical charts on patients with every disease or injury known to man. Mostly colonoscopies.

Snow shovel technician: Cleared sidewalks and dug out people’s cars or mopeds until I got the flu and started drinking heavily.

American Pawn: After the boss showed me where all the “defense pistols” were hidden and seeing so many shitty and broken down people, I quit.

Machine Shop: Dipped 10 lb. metal blocks headed to the pentagon in large tubs of terrible acid. Almost killed a co-worker with a 6 inch drill bit.

Speedway Copy: Worked a copy shop where I had to wear a tie. We dubbed our boss “The Nigerian Nightmare” because he treated us so poorly and berated us every day. All of us felt like white slaves to this horrible Nigerian man.

Marriott Hotel: Got hired for the night shift at this hotel because my girlfriend worked there, but when I showed up the boss said I wasn’t dressed properly and I should go home and change into something more professional. I left and never went back.

Icicle Inc.: Cut the heads off salmon as they came down a conveyor belt while tejano music blared. My boss would stand behind me with a stopwatch to see how many heads I’d cut in a minute. Sometimes I’d get to saw the fins off 110 lb. halibut.

Creative Writing Teacher: At a teen center in the Northwest I sat around in the park writing poetry and stories with a bunch of neglected teens. They were imaginative despite their problems.

Construction: Picked up trash, bricks, wood, nails and anything else at a construction site that had finished the job. I found a good coffee thermos one day.

Driver: At a car auction I would drive cars through the auction ring so dealers could bid on them and then I’d park them again.

AAA House Painting: Was the bookkeeper for this mom and pop business until the clueless owner started asking me for business advice. I told him all this stuff, about how they needed more professional shirts and he should hire another team so they could do more houses and that I needed my own office. Mostly I would show up late and listen to my girlfriend’s radio show and eventually he fired me. He gave me a professional looking shirt as a parting gift and asked me if I wanted to buy his motorcycle for $15,000.

Seasonal Worker: Sold Christmas trees, carried them to people’s cars and tied their tree on the roof or crammed it in trunk.

Comerica Bank: Was the assistant to a wheelchair ridden investment broker. I got his files, opened his mail and drove us to lunch in his special van. Usually to Souper Salad. I was really just company in an otherwise boring office.

House Sitter: I lived in this rich Canadian’s house in Costa Rica until we got in an argument one day and he demanded I leave immediately and pay him $20 dollars for the 2 months I’d been there. He was so furious he threatened to sick his dog on me and my girlfriend, but we’d already become friends with the dog.

Bookstore worker: Stood around and sold books until I was moved to the receiving department. I hated receiving so much I simply walked out one day.

Farm Hand: Built and painted fence on a ranch in Wyoming and gutted a 1978 Cadillac to get it ready for a destruction derby contest.

Nissan: Was the production assistant for 4 execs until one of my co-workers kept messing with me, saying I’d be working there for the rest of my life and to show him up I walked out and never returned. A year later, to the day, I called him up to say hello. I knew he’d still be there and he was.

Party Promoter: Threw raves and rock shows in an old Masonic temple until I realized it wasn’t worth the money since the cops and fire inspectors were coming down on me pretty hard. My best security guy getting thrown back in prison had something to do with it too.

Nut Picker: Me and a bunch of people went to a macadamia nut farm because we heard they’d give you $2.50 for every sack of nuts you’d pick, but when we got there all the nuts had been picked and most of us didn’t even get a bag full. We made around $10 between the 5 of us and bought a 12 pack.

Tilt Video Arcade: After I beat every character 3 times in a row on Virtual Fighter 2 there was really no point in my working at this place any longer.

Old Navy: I thought it’d be a great idea to drive 20 miles to work in a clothing store. After 3 days of being late they let me go. It wasn’t “the Old Navy way”.

Guitar Promotions: I stood in Cost Co. and played guitar in front of a pallet of guitars. I was told to convince customers they should buy a great guitar at a wholesale price. Mostly, I watched a Cuba Gooding, Jr. movie about dog sledding about 100 times on the television nearby.

Maintenance Man: Worked on the softball field at Texas Women’s University until I fell asleep in the backroom while it rained and the boss caught me.

Waiter: At a small Italian restaurant I waited on rich people with expensive taste in wine until I saw the chef drooling, from lack of sleep, into the croutons. The best thing was that we’d drink nice wines in the cellar the whole time we worked.

Magazine Peddler: Tried to peddle 3 different underground poetry magazines at the weekly farmer’s market in LA and made absolutely no money.

Hatchet Resort: Was a housekeeper and did ground maintenance at this mountain resort until 3 girls came through and asked me if I wanted to go the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho so I took the $40 dollars I had and never looked back.

Short Order Cook: By the time I could handle all the incoming orders it became impossible to stand the way the owner verbally abused his wife, so I quit.

Coffee Shop: Made espresso, Italian sodas, etc. and worked the cash register until the place went out of business.

Dolly Madison Driver: At 4:30 in the morning some guy was showing me how to drive the delivery truck and happened to slip and say they require you to work 60-70 hours a week. I told him I needed some coffee and got in my car and left.

Security Guard at a Concert: Was fired after someone saw me letting people in for money after the concert had sold out.

Quality Windows and Siding: Convinced people walking through Sam’s Club they should consider windows and aluminum siding because the shit was space-age and never needed painting. I eventually became manager, hired my friends and worked 2 hours a week, but told the boss I was working 25. This lasted a few months until he started catching on and I quit.

Counter top and sink wholesaler: I told this place I was an accountant so they hired me as one. I was okay at it, but they were doing lots of illegal stuff that made it difficult. One day the boss called me to his office and told me I smelled bad so I quit.

*References upon request.

This is from Travis Catsull’s latest book, “Death of An Image and Other Poems” that can be purchase here.

The poetry continues @ Haggard and Halloo Publications.

Drunk on Bacon
by Dan Raphael

sitting in a claustrophobic, slat-sided shed for several days
in a world of clotted smoke
where meat falls like rain
no one dies    no one inhales     no one churns
to love is to have whenever the appetite

pigs are born small
trees are smaller than grass but singularly thicker
from sun to fire
        fire retards time
when the sun goes out our clocks will surrender to gravity
my wrist is a video portal
since i am so many places its always breakfast somewhere,
always the first drink of the day

when i smell myself approaching, swallowing lit matches, stealing firewood
my flame will never stop
every night a new tree falls, three more sprout
when stars turn green they’re moving sideways

Fiesta frisbee legs running a gun.
Raspberry look a little giggle and a little tongue pulling in the sweet
fruit.
Jungle gym girl, jungle jim standing up on the bars, jungle gym chasing
Rocko’s gang,
hey baby you remember this one.

It was a spiral of metal mathematical bars,
must have been our kid attraction,
the dome
pentagon top,
triangle sides,
reaching off the great earth and the huge playground,
with sparse attractions.
Most of the space was vacant and earth.
Jumping high above the scotch 79 soccer field
with up turned mesh chest shirts behind the head.
Blake Edwards.
Blake red and white windbreaker,
Dreamed of christmas UFO nights with blue parades of blue snowmen
glowing
and nearly two-d christmas lights
and the magic was fading from the evil yard.
It was disney land alight but it was alien,
it was prismatic.

It was on my street,
and before on the white and yellow pink day on the driveway crest
I saw a gold governing movement,
a great glittering gold tray or sleigh craft, a flat disk,
with an unforeseeable army,
There he was, the burger king,
with his scepter and crown,
blank fiberglass stare,
and all the spirit of a cartoon god.

now let me tell you
what is a Brahmasastra
Brahmasastra, hindu weapon of war
near as I can make out
a flying wedge of mind energy
hurled at the foe by god or hero
or many heroes
hurled at a problem or enemy
cracking it

Brahmasastra can be made
by any or all
can be made by all of us
straight or tripping, thinking together
like : all of us stop the war
at nine o’clock tomorrow, each take one soldier
see him clearly, love him, take the gun
out of his hand, lead him to a quiet spot
sit him down, sit with him as he takes a joint
of viet cong grass from his pocket . . .

Brahmasastra can be made
by all of us, tripping together
winter solstice
at home, or in park, or wandering
sitting with friends
blinds closed, or on porch, no be-in
no need
to gather publicity
just gather spirit, see the forest growing
put back the big trees
put back the buffalo
the grasslands of the midwest with their herds
of elk and deer

put fish in clean Great Lakes
desire that all surface water on the planet
be clean again. Kneel down and drink
from whatever brook or lake you conjure up.

Rich people get the newest in technology
Poor people get the oldest
Then later, Rich people also get the oldest
Poor people get the not quite as old
Then later, Poor people get the almost newest
But not the Most New
Only Rich people get that
Also the very oldest
Only Rich people get that too
Poor people get shuffled around
Rich people get everything
Then later, Poor people get everything
But it’s shuffled around
So they forget that they have everything
But Rich people always remember
They have everything
Poor people forget
Poor kids and Rich kids
Like watching Betamax
Rich kids like watching poor kid movies
Poor kid like richie rich movies
Rich kid like lars von treier
Poor kid like jeff Foxworthy
Jeff Foxworthy had everything
But didn’t know it
Jeff Foxworthy had a Betamax player in his basement
But didn’t know it
Lars Von Treier had a Betamax in his guest bedroom
And he would sneak up there at night,
After his wife would fall asleep
And watch “The Prince and the Pauper”
Until the scene where they were found out
Then later, “The Parent Trap”
The original version
Not the remake version
Poor people movies made by Rich people
Everyone loves those best
Nobody likes John Waters
It’s where I first found out what “Emasculation” meant
John Waters Betamax tapes go for a lot of money
A Dike got her post-op sex-change penis emasculated
By her weirdo Mortville lover
In Mortville everything is backwards
Externally

CHICAGO POEM
by Lew Welch

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
Dignity. It’s a place that lets you
understand why the Bible is the way it is:
Proud people cannot live here.

The land’s too flat. Ugly, sullen and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. They
Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. In country like this there
Can be no God but Jahweh.

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames
Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
The stench stabs at your eyeballs.
The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town.

Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men
doing strong things in
Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light
and the furnace door opening with a
Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?

It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or
a Nazi who wished there were people
Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,
whose old man spent most of his life in there,
Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand.”

It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity.
Friends helped me. Then I put some
Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes
and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.

Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only
Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away – and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon
Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel in its ear
Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a
Light in there. His colour faded with his life. A small green fish…

All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. Far gentler
Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it.

There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you
can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing
To some ill-invented Thunderer
Brooding over some unimaginable crag.

It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it
all depends for its existence
Only and utterly upon our sufferance.

Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel
monstrosity. It
Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It’s already running us down.

You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what you’re going to do about it.
But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I’m not around

feeding it anymore.

Consumer Imperialism
by Charles Potts

(prolog)

While our attention is distracted by Iraq
Take time to object to some of the other wars
The American empire is fighting concurrently as well, such as
The war in The Philippines, the war in Columbia,
The war in Korea, the war in Afghanistan,
The war in Israel, the war in Pakistan,
The war in Yemen, the war on Terror,
The war on poverty, the war on drugs,
The war on The Bill of Rights,
The war on common sense itself.

The war of America against the world
Can’t be about anything grander than
The president’s pathology and popularity.

Not since King Lear have speakers of English been mislead
By a leader so completely ‘round the bend.
Power is dangerous enough in the hands of ordinary plodders.
In the hands of the crazy and uneducated
The danger expands exponentially.

The last time Congress declared war was 1941.
62 years later the siege mentality still rules.

The 18th century supposition behind the Separation of Powers, ie
Congress shall have the power to declare war;
The president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces
Presupposed that a declaration of war would precede
Any armed forces to command

Since we devolved to a permanent military
With the president as the commander
We have perpetual war
With Congress towed along like the tail of a kite.

Someday we’ll lift the siege and see
The pitiful men behind the curtains pulling strings.

Consumer Imperialism

1
In 1946 the Truman Administration cobbled together policy
That will guide America and the United States into a grave:
Stimulate domestic consumption and search for foreign markets.

World War Two propelled Americans across the world
Destroying their distinguished isolation
And Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self determination of nations,
Putting Hershey Bars and atom bombs along with GI Joes
Into the world word bank
Along with the great American coinage, OK.

OK can mean anything from yes to you are on your own.
OK, if that’s the way you want it,
OK with me.

It might have been OK if they’d confined domestic consumption to
The simple facts of warm clothes, adequate housing, and nutritious meals,
The need for which food stamp Americans have in common with everybody else.
“One third of the nation is ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed,” FDR declaimed seventy years ago.
It’s still true for radically different reasons one depression later.

In 1946 the American people were hungry to forget
The Great Depression
With its soup lines, dust bowls and railroaded hobos
As the speculated roaring of the twenties simpered out into
The savage thirties whine.

The exact point in the relationship between
Dying early to save the system money and
Working to consume yourself to death efficiently
Hasn’t quite been worked completely out to policy maker’s actuarial satisfaction.

Americans stood 19th century Maytag frugality on its head:
Build it well and make it last,
Darn your socks, grind your wheat, make your own soap,
Do without until you can afford it,
Into a plastic credit card throw away civilization
Destroying the environment on the side as a
Mildly regrettable cost of doing business
Symbolized by the shopping cart in the trough with
Wal-Mart’s predatory criminal labor and retail practices.

2
In the old days prior to 1946, except for Mexico, Louisiana, Oregon and the Indians,
The United States government had confined its actual imperialism
To the Roosevelt Doctrine’s annual obligatory invasion of Latin America

With a few cruel Hawaiian exceptions such as when their empire of ironic slaughter
Was taken to the limit in Aguinaldo’s Philippines
Led by Teddy Roosevelt’s “secret” admiration of the British Empire

Who goaded American into building a navy
Sufficiently enormous eventually to make the basket catch
Of the British Empire’s bases and other falling stock in the Atlantic Charter.

Post 1946 when imperialism became the way of life
Colonial wars piled up in the history books alongside Syngman Rhee’s Korea,
Hoh Chi Minh’s Viet Nam, Salvadore Allende’s Chile,
And Saddam Hussein’s broken Babylon.

Some of the secret history rarely gets recited in public
Like General Eisenhower’s perpetual overthrow by his CIA Army of
Governments in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, The Congo, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“It’s about jobs,” George Bush the 1st gesticulated nervously
When asked to rationalize the Gulf War he’d goaded
The allies into reestablishing the British Empire’s toehold on the oily Emirate of Kuwait.

The United States military has been under siege
Real or imagined,
Sometimes both; never neither,
Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor–
Sixty plus years of the war that never stops.

It’s what these southern kleptocrats desire
Under siege like the Confederates
Where they lost the battles and built the shrines
The basis (es) of their military theocracy preys upon.

Semi-Colon half an asshole Powell used to claim with a straight face that
The exit strategy is the most important aspect of Colonial War.
There is no exit from Consumer Imperialism.

Consumer Imperialism, World War 3.1

World War 3.1 was a knife fight at 20,000 feet.
Have your will up to date.

Never lose sight of the fact that the “faith based initiative”
Which took out the twin towers of the World Trade Center
Was carried out by trainees of the CIA once removed
Unleashing a relentless wave of video military fascism.

Win the war on terrorism by training counter terrorists
To terrorize other people in a war on abstract nouns.
Government by sarcasm is an unfit substitute for self rule.
Help wanted: somebody to shovel the horseshit off the information superhighway.
.
With each side referring to the other side as evil
It makes one wonder if both sides are right.
Evil is that which has power over you.
God doesn’t take sides; that’s what makes God God.
Human beings have no faith in their own story,
So they drag in God as the author of
Their Christian and Moslem shenanigans.

Flying hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon
Was a reckless act of freedom
Rather than an attack on it or democracy as claimed by the unelected
President Bush who obtained office by judicial fraud,
Hardly an unimpeachable spokesman for Democracy.

There was no attack on
The Samuel J. Tilden New York Public Library or
The Statue of Liberty.
That would have been an attack on Freedom and Democracy.

The world trade towers were a symbol all right:
A symbol of the Rockefeller brothers’ capacity
To manipulate the public policy of the
New York and New Jersey Port Authorities into
Rescuing some of their down in the mouth real estate
At the lower end of Manhattan.

The attack was on World Trade and Consumer Imperialism.

The design competition will create a monument to the victims.
How about creating a world trade system that is fair to all participants?
Now that would be an enduring monument.

War is now perpetual when it used to be punctuated by peace.
America is a winner’s tragedy; freedom destroyed in a pitiful exercise to save it.

Et Tu Bruté?

There’s nothing left of Caesar except a salad and a haircut.
Klipschutz

Caesar, Julius, who
Killed half the able bodied of France
To bring those reluctant frogs
Into a Roman pond

Who bridged the Rhein near Speyer
In ten short days
Without an environmental impact statement
Or German permission.

Comilitones, he intoned,
I have crossed the Rubicon.
Cut the Gordian Knot
As Alexander did.
Cut the umbilical cord
Across his mother’s belly
Up out from down under her narrow birth canal.
This is the way to the Cesarean section.

Not everybody born by the knife
Can grow up to be both
The Queen of Bithnyia
And the Emperor of Rome.

My fellow toddlers it is still
Government by assassination.
We can’t avoid the history of
The Meiji Restoration and Eisenhower’s CIA.
Brutus honey, is that you?

American presidents elected every twenty years since Lincoln
In zero years to match their accomplishments
Have either been assassinated or the attempt was made:
Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan.
Among these august dead did the living
Have even half a chance?

What if Bush the younger
Brought into office by black robes
In the year of double zeros
Would take a silver bullet
To match the silver spoon
He’s been porking out in
The public lunch box with.

If some Shakespearean character in a play would say:
“Bush should be assassinated
To meet the rhythm test of history,”
She’d be making an observation
Not a threat.

Pity and terror are the Draino of literature
According to Aristotle and Herb Ruhm.
Therefor, making war on terror is an infringement
On poet’s rights.

Bring me the chicken Caesar
Hold the haircut.

Terror is half our stuff.
What’s next,
A war on pity?

The Rocket’s Red Glare

The empire can be managed to a soft landing
Or it can be kicked apart
By the idiots who rule it and their intended victims.

The second half of the war on Iraq
Suggests the American empire will
Fight colonial wars ad infinitum
Until they exhaust themselves.

Knowing this doesn’t knock me out with happiness
But it would save protesters a lot of time
If they can agree it’s the inevitable
Fate of empires
Who imagine they’re immune to history
While merely being ignorant of it.

the satellites slowly drive past my attention
which is locked in the static key of the tiny ravines
that criss-cross blisters on palm sunday
as i crawl towards another beer
for repentence

old pieces of laundry turn up at a magic show
and fly away as doves
afterwards
backstage
i tackle the moustache in the tophat and steal his sleeves
but all i find is a few ochre coins and a dead pigeon
no socks

so i mow myself under a fog of manspray
and collide with the field of twinkle twinkle and

the stain on the satellite
looks like texas
but no one has the eyesight to tell for sure
so no one believes

long measures of breath
shy of the water bowl
where grapes drift on their backs
pretending to feel sad about the raisins
as they graze the stars for something ancient
to turn into

but the third gate is rusted shut
and armies of ants swell to defend it
from the wrinkle in the poets knuckle

i’ve been building fists out of sleepy pills
shoving them into the mouths of story book statues
who complain of gigantism
yet can’t lift higher than a pig’s knee
(napolean’s knee being an exception)

a dazzle of splintered jolt
strangles my ankles in shoots of static function
stumble stairs
crumble step and
drop into the seed well
where I’ll sleep
under the occasional shade of the beanstalk
that sways over the open cavity

Sticky with summer mosquito swarm and candy apple sweat I stood on the corner in a town you can’t pronounce selling my wares. One dry frigid cunt for rent. Ten toes to suck. Two abnormally enormous nipples to chew. My mouth sucks like a greedy maw but that like most things is a big fat lie. The only thing I am greedy for is McDonald’s money. I like the coffee and hot apple pie. I don’t think about the hands, the hands that have touched my pie and put it in a bag. I also have plastic petunias for sale for people who are too afraid of Jesus to dilly dally in my murky waters.

Early Sunday Morning
by Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot,
but now I’m one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations,
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It’s like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else’s motorcycle,
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early- morning risers,
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.

Tonight the Neighbors Spell JESUS on Their Lawn in Christmas Lights
by Carrie Fountain

Walking by tonight, we’re reminded
there must’ve been a first time
for everything–one green shoot, a drop
of bluish water, a few red cells.
The letters wink at us as if they know
what they’re for, and we go by, saying
“Oh God, look at that,” as if we did, too.

Mornings, the lights are left on
to call very palely to the large,
uninterested sky. “We are all alone,”
they cry. And the sky answers back
by not moving an inch.

-From her latest book, Burn Lake

I was nine
when I watched my mother cough until she couldn’t breath;
I never thought that would be me.
Now sixty-three,
my lungs collapse and my heart is worn out; a flower fighting to survive slow murderous frost.

I long for just one more cigarette -
I sit on the white bench stained with rust on the back porch and imagine the ember
blazing against the last cold bite of April air.
I would die to feed on the filtered tip, to feel the darkness tingle my tongue.

Instead oxygen is fed to me through a tank
like a mother feeds a child.

Husbands? Who needs ‘em? I had a few, I’d be lying if I said they didn’t mean anything.
I have all I need now – an oxygen tank, and a daughter who lives in my house, and brings me vodka.

I look up at my soon-to-be garden through an empty glass, vision distorted,
the glass used to be filled with a vodka tonic
this garden used to be filled with growth my
body used to be filled with life.

In a month, “Will I make it another month?” I ask out loud, to make sure I’m still alive. Tina and I will shop for flowers to fill the space the winter cold has taken hostage: Widow’s Tears, Bleeding Hearts, German Irises, Panseys

The world lives to see another spring, everything comes back to life.
Curtis, the little black boy from down the street will ride his bike to come chat
with me on the back porch.
Rebirth and youth come together while emphysema picks another victim to meet Death.
What about the grandchildren? I promised the oldest, when she was the only,
that I would live forever. She will remember this while she sits at my side…

Will anyone tell Curtis where I went?

I lower my bones in you
Adriatic Sea
through the porthole
lapping on my ceiling
all night long

I surrender my joints and knuckles
the watery lining of my lungs
the passageways of breath
and brain wave
rock me

Mother of the apron pocket
crook of the arm
susurrous lullaby O
rock me in your cradle
all night long

He’s had the chest pains for weeks,
but doctors don’t make house
calls to the North Pole,

he’s let his Blue Cross lapse,
blood tests make him faint,
hospital gown always flap

open, waiting rooms upset
his stomach, and it’s only
indigestion anyway, he thinks,

until, feeding the reindeer,
he feels as if a monster fist
has grabbed his heart and won’t

stop squeezing. He can’t
breathe, and the beautiful white
world he loves goes black,

and he drops on his jelly belly
in the snow and Mrs. Claus
tears out of the toy factory

wailing, and the elves wring
their little hands, and Rudolph’s
nose blinks like a sad ambulance

light, and in a tract house
in Houston, Texas, I’m 8,
telling my mom that stupid

kids at school say Santa’s a big
fake, and she sits with me
on our purple-flowered couch,

and takes my hand, tears
in her throat, the terrible
news rising in her eyes.

While I was getting a drink at the bar
a half hour ago I saw you deciding,
she said, whether you should talk to me,
I tried making your decision easier
by smiling at you, but you started
talking to someone else. I’m
your second choice. Just like
Avis has to try harder than Hertz,
I have to try to outshine the other women.
Knowing you picked her over me
makes me want to tell you
to just go back to square one.

After We Saw What There Was to See
by Lawrence Raab

After we saw what there was to see
we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father
waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need
a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.
Why do you want so much stuff?
he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear
my mother saying, as if that took care of it.

After she died I don’t think he felt any reason
to go back through all those postcards, not to mention
the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower
and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays
and lucite paperweights, everything we carried home
and found a place for, then put away
in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.

He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,
and when she was gone—why should that change?
Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?
I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler
in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.
It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,
lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.

It’s the birthday of poet Kenneth Patchen, born in Niles, Ohio (1911). He came from a working-class family — coal mining on his mother’s side, farming on his father’s, and while he was growing up his father was a steel worker in Youngstown. His Scottish grandfather loved to read aloud Robert Burns poems. And Patchen said that in Burns’ poems and his grandpa’s stories, “there was what you would call magic.” He started keeping a diary when he was 12 years old, wrote poems throughout high school, went to a handful of colleges, and traveled around the country working as a migrant laborer.

Then he went to a friend’s Christmas party and met Miriam Oikemus, a college student at Smith and an anti-war activist. The daughter of Finnish socialist immigrants, she had joined the Communist Party at the age of seven. Kenneth and Miriam fell in love and exchanged letters for a while — Patchen wrote her love poems. They got married in 1934. A few years later, when Patchen was just 26 years old, he suffered a terrible spinal injury while he was helping a friend separate two collided cars. He spent the rest of his life in severe pain, and went through three surgeries. The first two surgeries were helpful, and increased his mobility, so he was able to tour the country and give poetry readings. He partnered with Charles Mingus and the Chamber Jazz Sextet, and he set his poetry to jazz music, for performances and recordings.

But during the last surgery, something went wrong and Patchen fell off the operating table and permanently ruined his back. He was bedridden for the rest of his life, but he continued to write and paint in bed. He said: “It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend.”

During his career, Patchen wrote more than 40 books of poetry and prose, much of it illustrated, including The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960), and But Even So: Picture Poems (1968). He dedicated every book to Miriam.

In 1945, two journalists published an article called “The Most Mysterious People in the Village,” about the life of Kenneth and Miriam Patchen. Miriam told the journalists that her husband was “absolutely impossible until he’s had a whole pot of coffee in the morning.” They wrote about visiting Kenneth Patchen’s bedroom: “The bed was massive and so was the man. He wore a faded gray sweatshirt with washed-out blue cuffs and pocket. The shirt was tucked into the waistband of black woolen trousers that were frayed at the cuffs. Patchen wore blue, maroon and tan Argyle socks, but no shoes. His body seemed muscular and powerful; his face delicate and sensitive. His skin was white and his eyes were a deep blue-gray.”

Years later, Miriam described their daily routine: “I’d be up earliest, go for the paper, read it. He’d awaken later, having finally gotten to sleep, have breakfast and look at the news, then get to work. ‘Get to work’ meant writing in bed, lying down. The upright sitting position was painful for him, then. I’d read, wash clothes, house clean, take coffee to him frequently. When we had almost no money life was the same as when we had a little. At 12th Street we always had the rent and money for utilities. With an advance from Mr. Padell we bought a couple windsor-style chairs, one easy chair and a table. What elegance those pieces gave to the doll house.”

Kenneth Patchen died in 1972, at the age of 60. Miriam Patchen remained a champion of leftist causes as well as her late husband’s poetry, and collaborated on his biography Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America (2000), by Larry R. Smith. Miriam Patchen died in 2000 at the age of 85, sitting up in a chair, reading.

Kenneth Patchen said, “It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do.”

Once in a While
by Mark Perlberg

Mother was agitated all morning.
A call had come from her brother Harold,
who was spoken of only in whispers
and despised by those with a talent
for never changing their minds.
But Mother loved him.

Somehow I learned that my uncle
had forged checks and spent time in prison.
And I knew he played the saxophone
in small jazz bands.

In late afternoon the doorbell rang.

My uncle stood in the hall.
A tall man slightly stooped, he shook snow
from his long brown overcoat. He had a high
hooked nose and wavy brown hair
that fell across his forehead,
and he carried packages wrapped in Christmas paper.

My stepfather signaled: disappear.

In early evening Uncle Harold
knocked on my door with a gift for me:
jazz records, the first I’d seen.

Fats Waller beaming from the album cover
is clearer to me now than my uncle’s face.
“I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”

A mourning sax backing Lee Wiley:
“Once in a while, will you give just
one little thought to me…”

At first light my uncle was gone,
His footprints vanishing in a fresh fall of snow.

I can now confirm that I am not just fatter
than everyone I work with, but I’m also fatter
than all their spouses. Even the heavily bearded
bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend.

When my co-workers brightly introduce me
as “the funny one in the office,” their spouses
give them a look which translates to, Well, duh,
then they both wait for me to say something funny.

A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar
to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living
in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors.
I don’t know how to look like I’m not struggling.

Sometimes on the subway back to Queens,
I can tell who’s staying on past the Lexington stop
because I have bought their shoes before at Payless.
They are shoes that fool absolutely no one.

Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits.
It wasn’t until I arrived at the bar that I realized
my special holiday party outfit was exactly the same
as the outfits worn by the restaurant’s busboys.

While I’m standing in line for the bathroom,
another patron asks if I’m there to clean it.

For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture:
coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east
where the deer have almost ceased to pass
now that the developers have carved up yet another section,
filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff.

Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise
for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand;
only three years past came great horned owls
who raised two squeaking, downy owlets
that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road
behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail.

It was on an August afternoon that you drove in,
curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek,
that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight,
three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze,
who vanished when you turned your head.

We have felt the presence on this land of others,
of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left
in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up,
turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals;
their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow
where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

Buying Stock
by Denise Duhamel

“…The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not
guarantee total protection and that while
there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in
transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission
would be absolutely impossible.” –The Surgeon General, 1987

I know you won’t mind if I ask you to put this on.
It’s for your protection as well as mine–Wait.
Wait. Here, before we rush into anything
I’ve bought a condom for each one of your fingers. And here–
just a minute–Open up.
I’ll help you put this one on, over your tongue.
I was thinking:
If we leave these two rolled, you can wear them
as patches over your eyes. Partners have been known to cry,
shed tears, bodily fluids, at all this trust, at even the thought
of this closeness.

Sitting perfectly upright,
contented and pensive,
she holds in one hand,
loosely, the reins of summer:

the green of trees and bushes;
the blue of lake water;
the red of her jacket
and open collar; the brown
of her pinned-up hair,
and her horse, deep
in the yellow of sunflowers.

When she stops to rest,
summer rests.
When she decides to leave,
there goes summer
over the hill.

My own jury I acquitted my inner savage,
known for one-kneed vows to décolletage.
I was aiming for shadows bones make,
namely, the jolt of leaves and roses. A clock struck
and returned the slick smell of snow
on chanterelles. I settled into a naked meadow.
Beneath my right palm disappearing, I brought
an even finer thirst for soil and amateur brawls.
When I faced Nature, I had not a tincture of will.
I tossed her on my bed and kept still.

Just once I’d like to be a danger
To something in this world,
Be hunted by cops
And forced into hiding in the mountains,
Since if they left me on the streets
I’d turn the country around,
Changing everyone’s mind with a word.

But I’ve lived so long a quiet life,
In a world I’ve made small,
That even my own mind changes slowly.
I’m a danger only to myself,
Like the daydreaming night watchman
Smoking his cigar
Near the dynamite shed.

The Beautiful American Word, Sure
by Delmore Schwartz

The beautiful American word, Sure
As I have come into a room, and touch
The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such
Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

As I care for what I do not know, and care
Knowing for little she might not have been,
And for how little she would be unseen,
The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.

Where the light is, and each thing clear,
Separate from all others, standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,

And hope for day when the whole world has that face:
For what assures her present every year?
In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.

Back a
few years
my granddaughter
hooked up
with this
scrawny kid
named Andy
at a
Rainbow Family
gathering in
Arkansas &
then at a
Hempfest rally
in Seattle the
police towed my
granddaughter’s
van from where
Andy had
parked it
in a
no-parking zone.

Outraged at
authority as
he always is
he climbed the
cyclone fence
at the
holding compound &
tried to
run the van
thru the gate.

Unlike in
the movies
the gate
didn’t budge &
they both
got busted.

Andy skipped
out on the
court date &
left my
granddaughter
with a
$7,000 fine
that she’s
paying off
$25 a month.

People tell me
he’s bipolar
manic depressant
maybe even
schizophrenic but
if he
crosses my
path again
I’m going to
throw him
up against
the wall &
slap his
face til his
nose bleeds.

Keeping Things Whole
by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

In my sweetest dream,
you are tattooing my trussed white ass
as flour-dusted pizza dough on a heart-shaped cutting board,
while your twin sister stands under the birthday pinata pony
lactating Milk Duds, Red Hots and Candy Corn—
the pony, lactating, that is, not your
sister, and then you softly whisper:

Aren’t you forgetting something mister?
—pushing a bolus button at the base of my testicles
like a toaster lever, ‘till that prodigious penis it

pops right up,
and Sis is able to toss her lime green hula hoop
as a horseshoe bulls eye smack dab on the pulsating
purple head, while clapping out the funky rhythm
for the first verse of “Mickey” the cheerleader song.

I’ve told you already
about the eye patch and permanent
palm prints on my pasty forehead, that came from playing
Patty Cake and Rock-Paper-Scissors with a paranoid
schizophrenic Three Stooges fan in Washington Park;

I let you know about our previous life together
as Appalachian flower children riding astral planes
made from my magic carpet tongue sparks
flogging your flint rock nipples.

I’ve given you the password to my heart
in all its anagrammatic permutations; but you seem
to insist this is nothing but a start; so herewith, at
last comes the story of my first puppy—
an Airedale named Chipper

who could jump
five feet into the air
to kiss my cheek, and then spin
and spin, like Brian Boitano,
all the way back down
to the ground.

Wanting and dissatisfaction
are the main ingredients
of happiness.
To want is to believe
there is something worth getting.
Whereas getting only shows
how worthless the thing is.
And this is why destruction
is so useful.
It gets rid of what was wanted
and so makes room
for more to be wanted.
How valueless is the orderly.
It cries out for disorder.
And life that thinks it fears death,
spends all of its time
courting death.
To violate beauty
is the essence of sexual desire.
To procreate is the essence of decay.

I’ve opened a can with its opener.
I’ve opened a can with my teeth.
I’ve returned to find fire in the kitchen.
I’ve found my keys, instead.
My favorite dress is the backless one.
There’s always the problem of the bra.
How much fuel runs the 1956 bulldozer?
Why does the brush acquiesce to its bulk?
Does the brush reap rewards for prostration?
Does the onion lust for eyes?
I’ve lied, but only twice in this poem.
Here’s some dirt I’d like to bulldoze.
It’s civic, that dirt, heaped over bodies, cultivated toward lawns.
The house’s vendettas are ready for new occupants.
My arm is long with fingers
turning on the truthful lamp, folding habits of a blanket.
fidgeting lectures in my lap
I’m feeling more bingo than slot machine, social, I mean.
The way the mosquitoes share my face with me.

Hometown
by Beth Woodcome

The shame in the church crawls out of each human. A mild sin grows first behind the ears.

The wind: it comes without thought or any use of my hands. My hair grows the same color as the red scarf covering a lamp. I’ve heard of women who lead men into a chamber that is stained like the pit of a cherry. Place something upon the tongue. Go in peace.

Pretending there is no time to stop and look at the old gravestones that lean south, my father keeps driving. The common is cold and blown clear of leaves. This is near Chocksett School playground where a German shepherd tore up my soft back. My father took me to the dog that night to let it smell me. I held it in my arms. We’re all bound to something.

The strain of the body in trauma stresses the heart muscle. When I come up for air, the wind fills my throat before I realize I want it to.

When I think of what I am, I think of this small town. The dog, my back, the women, my dog.

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative
by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

Blackberries on Horseback

Up and down Blue Creek

I pick Blackberries

Ripe in the August sun.

Shiloh takes a bite

Gets his lips hung up

On the stickers.

He swings his neck way out

For Ocean Spray and

Way down for Chicory.

Getting It Right
by Jack Gilbert

Lying in front of the house all
afternoon, trying to write a poem.
Falling asleep.
Waking up under the stars.

My hit list is riddled with names
that are homogenous. Joe Joe Joseph,
Mary Mary Marianne, William William
Bill Bill Bill, but never another
Dave. This Dave was a special
assignment involving something
that I can’t disclose here, but
I want to remember Dave as
a person I took immense pleasure
in snuffing out. A Dave whose
existence can never be
anything other than Dave. And so,
I have a six-sided Chinese star
of David, and it’s David David David
from now on.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

TEN BILLION
by Nicole Kuwik

10 Billion farm animals will be
slaughtered next year,
and 60% of each body
will be buried in pits
in
Texas, Ohio, California

I grew up in the grass
in summertime Ohio,
a little girl blowing bubbles and skinning
knees, and all the while
calves were being blasted
‘tween the eyes with
buzzing
prods all across
the U.S.A.

In China, they use
organic waste to produce
energy, but there are many
problems, see,
the fat, see,
it leaves a layer
at the end of it all, and
bones, they just won’t
break
down.

Bringing them all back, the right Andean
chemicals, prayers to the Underground
spirits, Great-Great-Great-Grandmother
Adeline Fox coming out of the Red Cedar
River, Great-Great-Great Grandfather
Sean walking over the mountains toward
our stone cabin with a pitchfork in his
hands praising Jesus, “Not long now and
He’ll be back,” The Inquisition hovering
around in the clouds as the Great-Great-
Great-Greaters make their way north into
Celticism, the latest womb-escaper, Beatrice,
coming into my workroom, “I want colored
paper, violet, I’m making violets,” as the
Weather Devil drolls on “Tomorrow, tomorrow,
tomorrow you’ll see, see, see…..,” feeling
existentially ONE as the rest of the antiquities
slither through the cracks in the windows and
drop down the chimney into the flames that
can’t/won’t touch them.

Please Fire Me
by Deborah Garrison

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male–
a man’s man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:

I’ve never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I’m through

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.

I’d like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don’t mean
Europe.

Dear an hour north the trees
are already shuttered leaves

whip my face and the lake
is lashed to whitewash while

back home our initials grow
dim erosion smoothes cement

and names and your lover writes me
letters detailing your predilections

in colored pencils asking for friendship
I suppose she does you well out here

in the forest the season is brewing
and no one minds the strange

accent the new girl wears around
her neck with a cross our senses shatter

on punctuation and dropped Roman
vowels streetlights and shadows

follow sirens deep into the maze
of named streets while here a fox

has been eating chickens one by one
in the skeleton night where once

a shiv of moon grew flat on our lake
while snow fell and held the light

Stars and Stripes
by Catherine Wiley

I’ve called the cops on him,
friendly guy next door who sneaks
pork fat to my cat, cookies
to my daughter. He tends
with the vigilance of love
a red van hunkered on the curb,
paint flaked and pale U.S. flag
sealing the rear window. He sings,
then weeps when he’s had one
too many beers.

The night he swears to kill
his wife–sobs and curses
through the screen jangle me
from sleep–police come fast,
five white cars block the street,
two men vault the broken gate
to pound the door and wake
with a flashlight in his eyes
the old man whose house it is,
whose son.

Morning, I ask how she is
through the fence where she rests
an elbow; thumb caressing
her bluing cheek. She says
with disbelief that someone
called the cops, she thinks she might
know who, she’ll kick their ass.
Later in full sun and heat
a different neighbor stops.
“I wish they’d get it over with,”
she sighs, “and shoot each other so
the rest of us could sleep.”

After the first glass of bourbon,
sitting in the shade, smelling charcoal
turn to dust and chicken skin
to gold, the grass and weeds
don’t look so tall.

The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these definite jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman’s turning — her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.

Take the useful events
For your tall.
Red mouth.
Blue weather.
To hell with power and hate and war

The mouth of a pretty girl…
The weather in the highest soul…
Put the tips of your fingers
On a baby man;
Teach him to be beautiful.
To hell with power and hate and war

Tell God that we like
The rain, and snow, and flowers,
And trees, and all things gentle and clean
That have growth on the earth.
White winds.
Golden fields.
To hell with power and hate and war.

Today as I let go, a hoola hand into the dawn
Among silhouetted horse heads, held by a rope corral
But then, that day was many winters ago
To good horses you are drawn
I have asked that you ride the best
Of beautiful words to create images
Of life’s reflections filled with feelings of reality
Winters many may you ride the best.

As sunlight moved in the wind
Among the shadow of an ash tree
I gave the sweat lodge a drink
In the absence of memory
An ole’ feeling sprouts
In the charred remains of life
It is customary
That I have no doubts
Wishful thoughts and prayers through dreams strive
For peace in our souls
May you ride the best
Through the four different grounds
Upon our sacred mother earth.

Henry Real Bird is the current poet laureate of Montana. Right now he is riding a horse across the state of Montana handing out books of poetry. Read the story here.

Vandals
by Jennifer Boyden

They wrote it all down for me.
In the living room on the walls
they wrote who gave it up and who wanted it
most and a phone number. They told me
where to stick it, how to like it,
what the consistency was. There was a lot
I didn’t get, but they left more under the bridge
and against the back of Red Plank Records.
But I never met them. They came in the smoke
of my absence, during the hum
of appliances that needed to be wrapped
with stuffing and tape.
They made me the queen of their intent,
all the messages like stars
on the undersides of overpasses. I stay informed
about the people—what they do to each other,
how to take it, what number to call
for a piece of your own and what happens
if you’re not there to get it.
I watch for them to come back.
I watch for them from across the street
in my rented room with the walls painted red
and my little bit on and the curtains
more than slightly parted.

1

Anything cancels
everything out.

If each point
is a singularity,

thrusting all else
aside for good,

‘good’ takes the form
of a throng
of empty chairs.

Or it’s ants
swarming a bone.

2

I’m afraid
I don’t love
my mother
who’s dead

though I once –
what does ‘once’ mean? –
did love her .

So who’ll meet me over yonder?
I don’t recognize the place names.

Or I do, but they come
from televised wars.

Duality II
by Wendell Berry

What can bring us past
this knowledge, so that you
will never wish our life
undone? For if ever you
wish it so, then I must wish
so too, and lovers yet unborn,
whom we are reaching toward
with love, will turn to this
page, and find it blank.

Immanence
by Eileen Myles

All the doors in my home are open.
There’s a pulse outside I want to hear.

The phone’s unplugged.
The pastiche of you on me would be unforgivable now.

If there’s a god squirming around
she sees me & is me.
I wish the birds were souls, invisible.
I wish they were what I think they are; pure sound.

you know that song
by jason mashak

I remember smoking on the porch, barely
breathing in a mossy wicker chair.

You came up the steps like an old song
I’d not heard before,

the light of one lamp
on all your faces.

**

Jason’s first chapbook is for sale here.

Joaquin Miller (1837 – 1913)
Beard type: Mock Forked Elongated
Typical opus: Kit Carson’s Ride
Gravity (UPI rating): 51

More on this remarkable beard weight ranking system at the ever-fabulous A Journey Round My Skull

Singed foliage from a time machine in the Ozarks.
The rain tarp over an experimental anniversary gift.
The ventriloquist’s hand, in the dressing room, after
An intense set.

A porcelain bowl of discarded hearing aids.
Haunted guano by an Irish bat on historic rubble.
An open cold-cream jar on the midday windowsill at the K-spa
Reminded me of ox red quartz in the showy plaza of a blood cell.

A Gene Clark cassette sandwiched in the Mazda seats.
The X-ray of a complicated handshake.
Wrestling trading cards drizzled with King Cobra.
A piñata of a corncob pipe filled with baby corncob pipes.

Much later, stink lines from a bog within meters of a crayon
Factory, its consistency like that of a child’s brain.

The Sound
by kim addonizio

Marc says the suffering that we don’t see
still makes a sort of sound — a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries or screams that we
might think of — more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it’s like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh
when she sees her. It’s like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops.

Uncle Jim
by Peter Meinke

What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to Reno to get divorced
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in California.
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.

Mother said, It’s because he was the middle child,
and Father said, Yeah, where there’s trouble
Jim’s in the middle.

When he lost his voice he lost all of it
to the surgeon’s knife and refused the voice box
they wanted to insert. In fact he refused
almost everything. Look, they said,
it’s up to you. How many years
do you want to live? and Uncle Jim
held up one finger.
The middle one.

She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn’t matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn’t matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

It was dark I was drunk
Probably already stoned
Didn’t need another hit
Like I said: Dark, Drunk, Stoned
Picked up what I thought was dried bud
But certainly it could well have been an insect
Felt the same packed into the pipe
A fly a wasp a moth a midge
In any event properly ignited
Set on fire and sucked up
Thought it was some dead leaves
A thorn a thistle an incandescent straw
Tasted like holy hemp
Could have been anything maybe even a spider
Accented by a gooey pipe residue
No use scraping the screen for a corpse
Medicinal moss fern fungus mold
Husk larvae seed pupae pulp algae
Bong fodder clogging up the old windpipe
Although upon reflection maybe it was a spider
Illuminated by flame as it danced within a blaze
Inter-digitating 8 legged arachnid-like
Bosa Nova Quick Step Samba Paso Doble
Slowly stimulated by heat
Quickly reduced to ash
Yes I may well have smoked a spider
Or some such sentient being
Animal vegetable mineral stone paper scissors
Following the long legged blond
Straight down the rabbit hole
Gobbled up by obligatory prescriptions
Unexpected tax refunds
Highways lined with salad bars
And the fumes of flesh
Casting clouds of doubt
Upon preconceived notions
About the allegedly vast differences
Between the plant and animal kingdoms
Ultimately satisfying and oh so smooth
Got high while an insect did its last heel and toe
Got me thinking maybe it’s the next big buzz
As yes I guess I actually smoked a spider.

Death of a Lawn Mower
by David Ignatow

It died in its sleep,
dreaming of grass,
its knives silent and still,
dreaming too, its handlebars
a stern, abbreviated cross
in tall weeds. Where is he
whom it served so well?
Its work has come to nothing,
the dead keep to themselves.

Confessions
by Lowell Jaeger

I once shoplifted
a tin of Vienna sausages.
Crouched in the aisle
as if to study the syllables
of preservatives, tore off the lid,
pulled out a wiener and sucked it down.

I’ve cheated on exams.
Made love to foldouts.
Walked my paper route in a snowstorm after dark,
so I could steal down a particular alley
where through her gauze curtains, a lady
lounged with her nightgown undone.

I’ve thrown sticks at stray dogs.
Ignored the cat scratching to come inside.
Even in the rain.
Sat for idle hours in front of the TV, and not two feet away
the philodendrons for lack of a glass of water
gasped and expired.

So many excuses I’ve concocted to get by.
Called in sick when I was not. Grabbed credit
for happy accidents I had no hand in.
Pointed fingers
to pin the innocent with crimes
unmistakably mine.

I have failed
to learn from grievous error.
Repeated gossip.
Invented gossip. Held hands
in a circle of friends to rejoice
over the misfortune of strangers.
Pushed over tombstones.
Danced the devil’s jig.

Once, when I was barely old enough
to walk home on my own, I hid
behind an abandoned garage.
Counted sixteen windows.
Needed only four handfuls of stones
to break every one.

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything in silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table.

Speaking of sunsets,
last night’s was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn’t natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn’t breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another’s eyes?
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.

Topography
by Sharon Olds

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly form the left my
moon rising slowly form the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

sonic youth is playing
a tiny club in new orleans
with unwound and polvo and
the place is a pressure cooker ready to blow. a girl in
the audience scales the club wall
and stands
precariously
on a lighting rig
beam. we have to
stop playing and try to coax
her down. kim asks her why she is up there.
she explains she can’t see and for $30
she wants to see. we tell her
that tickets
are only $15 and she confesses
she had to buy one
for her boyfriend. kim sez,
“that was yr first mistake.”

Mickey Mantle drinks scotch
Sets his drink on the Mantle
Maybe it leaves a little ring
Babe Ruth drinks scotch

Talks about the time:

Swung his donkey bat
At the left field wall
Bludgeon you with his donkey bat
Piss and cum and wine and vinegar
And mirth and myrrh arch out the tip when real true contact wakes it up
Flows like wine

Mickey:

Yeah, Babe,
But you swung at everything
Homerun King, sure
But also, like, “strike you’re out”
Boom, “strike you’re out”
“Strike, you’re out”
Long Pause
“Strike ONE”
“Strike TWO”
And so on

I’m Babe Goddamn Ruth
Horse Dick Adonis
Flapity-Jack the Conjurer
Manipulator, commanding the common yield to the SPLENDID
Splitting The Crack of Dawn
Splitting it like The Crack of The Goddamn Bat

Spitting huge mouthfuls of vinegar tobacco spit into the ocean, who is my only true competition

i lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate
by Diane Suess

the paintings of seascapes we won’t be seeing in the Louvre.
the miniatures of the infamous Van Blarenberghe brothers.
no rented wooden boats in the Jardin de Tuileries

though this is not about a particular lover or a particular city.
even i am less a woman than a ball of mercury breaking
into forty pieces of silver.

there was talk of Prague, the Klub Cleopatra, that bar called
the Marquis de Sade. as if poetry lies there on a gold settee
smoking a black cigarette in a red holder.

green dress. that Van Gogh green, the color of his pool tables.
the ceiling too is green, and the absinthe we won’t be sipping.
the unmade love in unmade beds. small, oversensitive breasts.

Americans always think it’s elsewhere. believe
in transmutative sex. i did, when a girl, scrutinizing
my queendom, a colony of fire ants, their thoraxes

gleaming like scoured copper.

Sometimes people can smell ghosts – or god or a miracle happening
Moving around doing invisible business
Producing it’s own rankness between sulfur and plasma
Much like lightening- invisibility strikes
It’s a little funky
Like baking cookies and boiling down cabbage.

I came home one day and the apartment smelled like garbage
& I says, I says “what’s that awful smell?”
& Reed says “it’s my food. But it rhymes with garbage”
…later that night we made a special trip to the dumpster behind Einstein’s
to get a double bagged bundle of day old bagels
you see, they have to throw them away
otherwise they’d have to mark the price down
then everyone on the strip would stop buying fresh bagels
in lieu of saving a dollar
which is smart, on the parts of both parties

Invisibility is a chemical reaction
Like AIDS or bombs or Dr. Pepper or schizophrenia or spontaneous combustion
There’s a time and a place and person or a people
When all the factors are in order
The unseen mathematics begin rounding and rounding
Multiplying and dividing

The next thing you know you’re about to get laid
And you realize the pheromone spray is paying off
And the breath spray is doing its job
And the hairspray has remained wholly steadfast if only a little flaky

You take off your watch
You roll on your latex
And disappear

Your partner suddenly looks up
At no one
And you think
-why is she looking at me like that
why is she looking through me.

The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

The score is always close, the rally always short.
I’ve left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

cloquet bouquet

by dan raphael

“& yet downtown duluth minnesota had less snow this year than downtown houston texas.” -patrick mckinnon

stolen

swollen

cut off at the equator,

1% of 1% mathematically mistranslated and apportioned,

focusing the light to burn-blossom complexity from so much accumulated in a large confined space,

i roll out of bed and fall into a swimming pool with live fish

and a multi-salt stench without filters or discipline,

too many friends dropping by and zizzing through, iridescent puddles as calling cards,

how quick the wigs unfurl when spring rains chopped so fine you want to paint with them,

making a plaster glove hungry for more fingers, stick to the veins, avoid the tendon trap,

like we now make traffic signs from wood chips so meth heads wont sell them,

what years of flame retardant smoke will do to you,

textured disks shooting out from under my finger nails,

gravity disks pushing away everything but music.

9 in the afternoon, ½ way tween work & retribution,

my pants beginning to molt means the weekend

neath an unchanging sky we have 24 different words for gray,

we have punctuation to indicate the words are cynical or sung.

walking exposes you to the spectrum of hunger—from insect to budtip

to mammalian leg warmers whimpering with 98 degrees of satisfaction.

micro glaciers inside our brains measuring our life spans—

water clock, water boarding, vintage water w/ recommended serving temperature,

like dancing naked in summer rain then remembering im in beijing,

more towels than i can afford, $5 per flush,

if only we could synthesize an intoxicant from plastic, not just hallucinatory but skin tightening,

jumping into my mouth before i can say no

if it doesn’t storm in the next two days my pension fund goes bust.

tho im on the job more years than ive been alive

the forecasts warm and sunny, light traffic and free food

Sun curving lightly,
twist
over the glittering
blisterdome, six
mile-high coffeeshops
direct lightning
to where it cannot be reached,
except through

handshakes. I long
for the days before
the menstrual taboo
replaced the world of smells,
somewhere between sulfur
and the aging limburger
our parents smelled for us.

Taking the same feeling,
and without turning it
upside down,
what once was brevity
is now gravity.

Industrial smoke is best
rendered
in pastel, or wavy lines
of ink that can morph
into hair,
cartoonishly crude,

pocket surrealism,
trombones from the smokestack.

Colliding peach fuselage,
clouds appearing overnight
framing a rainbow,
colored by gases found
deep in the earth,

unexpected openings
and penetrations.

Long before running
my hands through the dog’s
hair,
I know from scent
the oil that will remain
on my fingertips.

Mirrors, converted
from the windows
of retired skyscrapers,
cover thousands of acres
of the earth’s surface,

redirecting energy
made negative
through overuse
back into the atmosphere,

helping our trash bags
stay fresh,
even on sunny days

free of unexpected moisture.

January 28, 2009

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT
by Charles Potts

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

Biographical info on Charles Potts.

Previously in Arthur:

“The Dope From Muskogee” by Charles Potts

Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia” by Charles Potts

Poem in Arthur No. 5

“Spasm Empire” by Charles Potts

CHARLES POTTS & SUNN 0))) AT ARTHURFEST 2005 – video footage

Virginia Aste, Black Rock Cafe, Pahoa, Hawaii, Mother’s Day, 2008. Photo by Susan Kay Anderson

“Freedom?”: Richard Brautigan’s first wife, VIRGINIA ASTE, speaks in a new interview

Interview by Susan Kay Anderson

Edited with Introduction by Mike Daily, with biographical information contributed by John F. Barber, Richard Brautigan scholar

Less-than-revered by his Beat peers (Ginsberg gave him the ungainly nickname “Bunthorne,” Burroughs once observed him—drunk—crawling along the floor of a hotel after a reading event, Ferlinghetti said he “was all the novelist the hippies needed” because “[i]t was a nonliterate age”), Richard Brautigan became internationally famous in the late ’60s for writing simple-yet-surreal poems, short stories and novels that made readers marvel and burst out laughing. Brautigan’s personal life, however, was no laughing matter. Severe alcoholism—drinking a bottle of brandy and two fifths of whiskey a day during binges, according to friend Don Carpenter—and depression over declining book sales led to Brautigan’s suicide in September 1984. He was 49.

Brautigan began writing Trout Fishing in America in 1961 on a camping trip he took with his first wife, maiden name Virginia Alder, and their one-year-old daughter, Ianthe. Married in 1957 and separated in 1962, they officially divorced in 1970. Before the separation, Virginia Alder had become involved with one of Brautigan’s drinking buddies, Tony Aste, with whom she later had three children (the first in 1965, the second in 1968, the third in 1969). There is no known record that she and Tony Aste ever wed, though she took his last name. Virginia Aste eventually moved to Hawaii in 1975, without Tony, who remained, living in Bodega Bay, California, and then San Francisco, where he died in 1996.

Today, 75-year-old Virginia Aste is a political activist working as a substitute teacher in one of the most violent school districts in Hawaii. Susan Kay Anderson, a fellow educator at the school, recently met Virginia Aste and interviewed her about her early life and travels with Brautigan.

“Virginia Aste is not a ‘little old lady type,’” Anderson reports. “She is almost six feet tall and wears glasses, well-fitting outfits and interesting jewelry. Her gaze never wavers. She laughs easily and speaks in a measured, self-paced, quiet tone. She is quite funny and self-effacing, able to laugh at herself.”

“Much of Brautigan’s past has remained shrouded in mystery for so long as to become mythology,” says John F. Barber, curator of the comprehensive, multi-media online resource Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. “Virginia’s comments and insights [in this new interview] are important because they help us better understand the stories behind Brautigan, his life and his writings.”

Like a Waterfall

Arthur: What were the ’60s like?

Virginia Aste: The ’60s were a lot like the ’50s, a continuation of [the '50s], except for ‘68 and ‘69. Then, everything changed. For example, I took Lamaze [childbirth classes] for Ianthe’s birth. They didn’t know what I was talking about in the hospital. They gave me some pillows and helped me lie on my side. That was that.

The change came with the music. There were concerts every day—really, really good concerts every two weeks or so. Groups from New York came. The concerts were in Golden Gate Park.

At that time there was the Cow Palace, a big stadium—George Wallace was to speak. All I remember was the atmosphere of hostility and women there. This [Cow Palace] was a place where women burned their bras; where riots happened. It was a feeling of a mob and impeding violence and we just had to leave. We had gotten Ianthe a new raincoat from her dad. Ianthe’s raincoat pocket caught on a car as we were leaving and she started to cry. It was no real riot that time, but it felt like it could’ve been. What we were witnessing was a lot of yelling and Wallace was yelling back. He was ranting. It was an awful ending to an awful day.

For a year, there were free concerts every other week. It was wild. Of course, there were precursors to this, pre-’60s. I purchased a Rudi Gernreich bra—it was see-through—and took off my shirt during a party. We saw how many people could crowd into a phone booth at a time.

In one house where we lived, there was something wrong with the plumbing so the water ran and ran. It was like a waterfall. We turned it stronger and then back again or we just got water.

We moved out of North Beach and out of Haight-Ashbury. There was a lot of alcohol and pot use. There was the Ice Cream Store where bikers and bus drivers took pills—early speed, the chicken egg-producing drug, methedrine, cheaper than heroin. It was the time of the Alphonse Mucha art style on concert posters: big bicycle wheels on bikes, elongated figures riding, and the skulls and roses of the Grateful Dead.

Richard admired the Diggers. Our whole thing was a proletarian idea that you take care of everybody. I remember baking bread in coffee cans. I did. We had everything available to us at the free store. We never had any money. I don’t remember paying for anything for a while. This was the last half of the ’60s.

Trout Fishing In America

Arthur: How did you meet Richard Brautigan?

Virginia Aste: I met Richard Brautigan at a laundromat in North Beach. I had wanted to meet him. He was very alluring and I thought he might’ve been from Germany. He didn’t say much. I had Ron Loewinsohn introduce us.

Richard was working in a lab that manufactured barium powder. People drank the powders for X-rays—there were different flavors like peach, strawberry, lemon. He came home smelling like those different flavors. They hired Richard for one dollar an hour.

I was working downtown as a secretary. I carried the typewriter home with me. It was very heavy. I typed up his poems. He began sending them out to places like The Nation. He started with fifty poems.

I was working for two dollars an hour. I was good at Dictaphone. From our tax return and claiming Ianthe as a dependent, we bought a 1951 Plymouth station wagon and took a trip across Idaho, five hundred or six hundred miles across the Snake River. This became Trout Fishing In America. Jack Spicer helped edit it. I helped edit, too, and typed it because I could read his handwriting. I used to read lots of [scrawly] doctor and lawyer handwriting.

In the Afternoon

Arthur: Did he read a lot? What was his writing routine like?

Virginia Aste: He would write in the afternoon because he watched Ianthe in the morning. That became a routine because I was working. He needed time and space, time and silence, but not totally. He did not lock himself away.

Between me and Jack Spicer and Richard reading us stuff, we would tell him to take out a lot. There wasn’t much left. That was Spicer’s thing.

He read incessantly at the Mechanics’ [Institute] Library. It was a library founded by a union in San Francisco. He’d read fiction on the second floor. He’d read the Ladies’ Home Journal. His earliest reading was the National Geographic. He’d read old issues when he was in elementary school and later read the Ladies’ Home Journal. He read Faulkner, Jack London, he read poetry.

I translated Neruda’s work for him into English. Also Mayakovsky. I took Russian then. A lot of people were killed under Stalin. People still talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War in those days.

B Vitamins

Arthur: Did you see his writing as genius writing?

Virginia Aste: Yes, Richard was a genius in his writing because of his humor. He was like Mark Twain or Saroyan because of his use of irony. He would be right on target.

He also had a sense of the tragic. He had sentimentality for his dead relatives but he was never syrupy sweet in that way.

He was very caring…cared very well for Ianthe. He paid the rent six months in advance. He had a stockpile of food in the cupboards. Probably because he cared for his sister, Barbara, while they were growing up. He had grown up very poor. I almost got him sobered up. I gave him a lot of B vitamins. After our baby, he began drinking heavily. Lots of socializing.

I read on the Internet that he had had homosexual liaisons at this time. It was when Ianthe was about four.

He had new fame. It was tremendously exciting. He began drinking heavily and became abusive. One night, he wanted to have sex and became violent—I shut him out of the bedroom. There were these thick wooden doors. The next day I left with Ianthe.

What happened was totally against what we were all about. We were so pacifistic. This was the dark side of what was going on. On the other hand, he did love guns and loved going shooting.

To Say the Least

Arthur: Did he talk the way he wrote?

Virginia Aste: Yes. Yes! He had a constant dialogue going and had constant jokes. He was interested in everything about art. Dada was one of the themes. Jack Spicer said that one should pick out the worst thing from a piece of writing and keep that and then write from that. He told Richard that and he did that.

He was experimental like William Burroughs and the same [in the sense] that he traveled around and had a huge following. Burroughs would tear a page of his writing down the middle and then match up the halves to different pages, creating interesting sentences, to say the least.

I think Richard was very sad when I left him, taking Ianthe with me. People didn’t talk about addiction—about drinking—then. Oh, I should’ve…maybe stuck with him. It was a few years later when the lawyer had me sign for a divorce. I didn’t make any claim to his work.

All of his early books, I know exactly what and where he is talking about—even though the writing is ambiguous on purpose. I can picture this or that place.

Once we lived in Big Sur, in a cave that was carved out of a hill with a little roof jutting out of it to keep the rain off. He was very interested in the history of WWI and WWII. Especially WWI and the Civil War. He was particularly interested in the campaigns of the southern generals. He talked about the Holocaust. He was fascinated with the personalities surrounding Hitler and in the atrocities dictated by the S.S.

Into the Creek

Arthur: Was he a history buff, a ghost town buff?

Virginia Aste: He was very interested in graveyards; gravestones. Interested in imagining what people’s lives were like—the food they ate, the clothes, one hundred and two hundred years ago. He was interested in the working people.

On our trip to Idaho, we read gravestones on old cemeteries.

He was always connecting different times and people and places together. He did this constantly—made connections. He had a maniacal laugh. Ianthe has the same…a real wild laugh.

In ‘57-‘58, we did crazy things. Climbed up on the Palace of Fine Arts and looked over the city—all the heads of statues toppled over. Once with Kenn Davis, who was selling paintings at the time, we went to a reading. The hood of our car flew off at one o’clock in the morning as we approached the Bay Bridge. Richard jumped out of the car, opened the trunk and threw it in. He could move really, really fast when he had to.

We were cooped up inside five days once in Big Sur, up a little creek. Water came down and we could not get up to the highway. He jumped into the creek and got me. He never could swim. He never did learn to swim.

He was capable of athletic feats nobody thought he could do.

In Big Sur, Richard was very interested in Price Dunn, who was “the Confederate General of Big Sur” [from Brautigan's book of the same name]. Price read the Greek classics, et cetera, as a child in Alabama. He took us down to Big Sur. We were two or three weeks there. We talked, fixed meals, had two cases of wine. I remember there was an invasion of frogs there. We poured wine around the porch to try to kill the frogs. They were kind of like the coquí in Hawaii.

As one of my friends said about Richard, “He was like shining too bright a light on too small a thing.” His writing was not voluminous. By the time it got pared-down, and pared-down, there weren’t a lot of words. There wasn’t a lot to work with.

He was good at listening to criticism. He worked with and listened to Ron Loewinsohn, an academic and a poet. He wasn’t like Robert Duncan who was a traditional poet, or Ken Rexroth, who was a target for poets because he was so academic.

Richard was contemptuous of literature taught in college. He got to become the flavor-of-the-month for a lot of them. He liked the Black Mountain College poets [Creeley, Dorn, Olson]. Richard knew Lawrence Ferlinghetti; some of the artists. Artist Tom Field was a really neat guy. He lived with us for awhile and was an inspiration to Richard. He taught Ianthe drawing when she was two.

A Great Fan

Arthur: What do you think he would’ve thought about current technology, the Internet?

Virginia Aste: In “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” [1967], Richard anticipated the impact of computer technology. He was happy to get an electric typewriter. It was a lot of work making corrections on copies of his work, and typing it over and over. It took a lot of time. It was a lot of work.

He would’ve been a great fan of the word processor because he couldn’t spell.

I think he ran out of things to write about, unlike Styron and Mailer—who he didn’t like. Alcohol shut down his spontaneity and depressed him and accelerated/exaggerated the parts of his personality that was pessimistic about people. I’m pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts as the highest people could live for.

Freedom

Arthur: Was it unusual to be traveling and camping—going on a road trip—with a child in Idaho? Did you grow up there, is that why you went there on the infamous Trout Fishing In America road trip?

Virginia Aste: I grew up camping a lot. In those days, if you were a hundred miles out of L.A., in Mojave, for example, you were in the mountains. My father was a fisherman, he liked to fish. He was one of eleven children. My mother was a school teacher. It took her sixteen summers get her teaching license.

We took two trips. We had an Indian theme going with Ianthe in a little pack. We almost suffocated Ianthe.

Arthur: A cradleboard?

Virginia Aste: Some misguided Indian thing. We were gone two weeks to the Klamath River. Ianthe was too hot. When we took her out [of the cradleboard] she sort of unwrapped herself and threw a fit.

On our trip across the Snake River we could watch Ianthe because she had a pink fabric leash [harness] like a dog that we tied to a tree. We used it one time. We had to be absolutely sure about her because we were very close to the river. It had a steep cliff. A sharp drop-off to the river.

We almost didn’t make it. The first night, we drove down into an old lake bed— I think it was called Dollar Lake. Oh, was it there? Anyway, we had boxes in our 1951 Plymouth, books, boxes of clothing in the back of the station wagon in wooden crates, paper bags, baby stuff. Lots of Dostoevsky, we couldn’t go without Dostoevsky! God forbid we go without that! Ha!

That night we slept inside the back of the car. Everything was on the ground. Then, within minutes, a huge cloud burst. There was going to be a flood of mud, huge raindrops, dollar-sized, the area began filling with water. I put Ianthe somewhere. I started driving up this road and I couldn’t see.

Arthur: Richard was guiding you up?

Virginia Aste: Yes, we were in the middle of a huge cloudburst, we were stuck—Dollar Lake, or wherever that was. The road wound around and around. It was so impossible to see. That was the first or second night of the trip. That was the beginning of Trout Fishing In America. Sleeping in the back of that station wagon. That’s why it was so crazy. It was a shift car with the shift on the wheel.

Richard ate a lot of watermelon and had to pee in the night. That’s how we found out the lake bed was filling in.

Arthur: Lucky.

Virginia Aste: So, I don’t know why we did the trip. Re-visiting Idaho, I guess. We saw the Snake River in the beginning of its decline and urban development. It was Indian-based.

Arthur: Romantic.

Virginia Aste: So romantic. Very romantic idea.

Arthur: Did a lot of writers take off with their families at the time and camp?

Virginia Aste: We were ahead or behind the times. Having a child was unusual at the time. Well, some had children. David Meltzer had three kids. Ron Loewinsohn had a child later. Robert Creeley. But from what I read of Kerouac, his trips were not family-oriented.

Arthur: This seems a bit different compared with trips other writers were taking across the country. Do you think?

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was quite amazing. The clutter of the station wagon. Now, there are containers for everything. There weren’t then. [We used] wooden crates and paper bags. We had a ridiculous tent. Stakes for the tent, food. The tent had to have stakes. It was canvas. It did not pop up. If a stake was lost, you had to find a tree, cut a new one.

Arthur: It sounds like homesteading.

Virginia Aste: Re-enacting a whole bunch of stuff—it was a long trip. A canvas tent during the day is hot. Washing diapers in the streams…we weren’t conscious of the fact that it was polluting.

Arthur: You were mostly alone at the camp spots?

Virginia Aste: Yes, usually the only people except for local fishermen. We saw some sheep, sheep farmers, and had to go through the herd of sheep and then came back round again. The sheep men just smiled. They knew [we weren’t getting anywhere]. Richard wrote about this.

Arthur: You were really wild, adventuresome.

Virginia Aste: There were no maps, no guides. We went up and down the creeks until we found a good place. Taking that tent up and down…we were re-enacting some parts of our pasts.

We had traveler’s checks and finding a place to cash them was hard. There was nowhere to cash them. Like in those novels where you read about the South, very backwoods. It wasn’t convenient.

Our baby was always an icebreaker. Richard had a song he sang, “Orofino Rose.” He sang that over and over to Ianthe to get her to sleep.

Arthur: Why didn’t you just use cash? I mean, what was the point of traveler’s checks? Because you were travelers?

Virginia Aste: Yes. We had gone to Mexico, to Oaxaca and had traveler’s checks there. That might’ve been a role model for that. Richard was paranoid about losing money.

Arthur: It sounds sort of urban, but you were both raised in rural areas. Or at least, not in big cities.

Virginia Aste: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn’t exactly inspire your imagination there. San Francisco was really inexpensive when we lived there. It was a city life, lots of poetry, but then—

Arthur: You wanted nature, adventure, taking the trip to write about it on purpose?

Virginia Aste: Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later. He was always taking notes. His short paragraphs were like poems. Real different writing. Coming back [after the trip], it was very short on words, not prolific, turned into short chapters that were almost poems. They were so funny.

But everything changed. Ianthe was two when I met Tony [Aste], my later lover. Richard had become so abusive from alcohol. What boys see done to women in their youth…Richard and I weren’t about that at all, we were into Camus—not towards others, but how we viewed ourselves.

Richard was fascinated by war—by WWI and WWII. He shot up one wall of his house in Montana which had a clock on it.

Arthur: That must’ve been really loud.

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was like a war, the sound of war. I didn’t mind him going shooting, but…we had this spaghetti party, and afterwards he yanked the door open. He didn’t wake Ianthe, but he was very violent. I left soon after with Tony.

In Richard’s poem, “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,” his writing is a predilection in a way. It has come true. There isn’t anything you can do. The ether is full of good deeds and misdeeds—it all gets recorded. I’ve never looked back. I don’t sit around and reflect on the past. I’m in the moment, in the now. I’ve lived that way my whole life.

People were living in communes and trying to be peaceful. What it came down to was falling into prior patterns. Richard just fell into that as far as I could see. He liked Katherine Anne Porter a lot and also Eudora Welty.

I think he had a special admiration for writers who were profound and humorous at the same time. He really liked the Armenian short story writer [William Saroyan] who wrote My Name is Aram. There were so many things that I didn’t ask Richard about. It was us against the world and rebellion. Like living in a bubble. What did we want?

Arthur: Freedom?

Virginia Aste: Freedom from the society that had jammed people into unhappy relationships and war. Freedom from that.

“one for jack”

jack rose was one of those guys
with whom one feels an immediate bond
he wasn’t a physical giant or anything
but he had an immense presence
something, perhaps, more spectral than tangible
which filled a room easily
enveloping you in a kind of bear hug
that could seem either threatening or comforting
depending on the look in jack’s eyes
and on the level of self-assurance
in which you held the quality of yr record collection

jack was an excellent drinking partner
even if you weren’t imbibing yrself
he would see that yr portion was duly taken care of
without so much as a peep of complaint
and he had a set of ears and hands as big as his heart
which was huge as his thirst
once he’d left pelt and started his serious acoustic journey
we’d talk sometimes about guitarists and how they did certain things
i could almost never follow him after a while
but i figured his observations were right, because almost every time i saw jack
his technique would have moved to a whole new level
beyond his models, beyond his friends, almost beyond the bounds of the possible

occasionally we’d see each other for an intense string of days
then not again for a year or so…even more, i guess
but it was always great and easy to hang out with him
we’d make fun of each other’s cooking and record collections
maybe arm wrestle a bit, or at least talk about who was stronger
damn…
jack was just one of those people you knew you were gonna know for a long time
there was an agelessness about him that gave you the sense
he was built to last, like a bull
or a china shop
although what i guess he resembled most
was a bull becoming a china shop
his transformation from drone thug to master primitive
was amazing to behold
and we are so lucky – all of us
to have known him, or at least his music
because that music will always be available
as long as people can still perceive brilliance
and let’s hope that’s forever

so long, jack
tell fahey he’s goddman fatso
i’ll never forget you, man

–byron coley
deerfield ma 12/08/09

photo by dan cohoon

Shivastan Press presents the “Small Press Revolution!”
book release & readings for “wildflowers- a Woodstock mountain poetry anthology”
featuring Lee Ann Brown, Donald Lev, Janine Pommy Vega, Andy Clausen, MJ Lamontagne
(+ special guests! – hopefully Ed Sanders)
followed by a celebration of the new release of “Atlantis Manifesto”
featuring Robert Kelly & Peter Lamborn Wilson.
hosted by Publisher Shiv Mirabito, info 679 8777
admission only $5

Because the living room did not lie down a super highway,
Spike had to put up signs to have the big trucks detour through.

ZZZZWOOOOOMMMMM
said the red
sign Phospher’s wife
blew into
the air. It took off down the road after
the red truck.

Klyd Watkins’ first chapbook of poetry, pete’s improvizations [sic], was published by Owl’s Breath Press in 1969. During the seventies he produced ten lps of Poetry Out Loud with his wife Linda and with Peter and Patricia Harleman. These records are still collected. He has alternated between writing poetry and creating poetry by direct audio recording of improvisation. Since the ’90s he has sometimes combined the two, using text as well as improvisation in his recordings and publishing written poetry. His CDs include Listen The Night, as part of the band What Are We? with Mike Panasuk, and “Harp All Made of Gold,” which presents chapter one of his long poem Jack spoken over world class rock and roll. Books include Ghost Trees from Sugar Mountain Press and 5 Speed from The Temple.
His own poetry and that of friends, both well know and never heard of, appears on his website: http://www.thetimegarden.com/
http://thundershack.net/ is devoted to his backyard recording studio.

St. John’s Fire

Next time you stand at the foot of a spiral stair,
look straight up,
into the dome, owned by
the gold and green brothers, Polaris and Sirius.
And there, you’ll see
the dove and the raven,
the flood birds, entwined,
in the pupil of a god’s eye, and the
god’s double tongues—one of leather, one of steel—
carving silver peacocks
into the backs of liars and other faithless.
They fill the streets
with their gunpowder cries, but
intrepid, you kick past their glittering,
bottled hollers, approaching
the mossy queen with
tiny lions climbing
from her open collar.
Your fresh supplications, awkward and
skinless, hover near the queen’s feet,
until the twin cubs devour them
and run. You must chase them,
without wheels or engines or bullets this time;
only your untried calves and thighs and lungs, only
your untested heart.
And you chase them, every midnight and midmorning,
past the tribes of the hopeful
tending St. John’s fires,
and camping at the ocean’s fingertips.

T.M. Göttl, a member of the Buffalo ZEF Creative Arts Community, has won a Wayne College Regional Writing Award and a Franklin-Christoph Poetry Prize. She won first place on the first time she ever competed in a poetry performance competition. She travels throughout the state of Ohio, writing and performing her poetry, and her work has appeared online and in print, in places such as Deep Cleveland, The Poet’s Haven, The Mill, The Hessler Street Fair Anthology, and a bilingual poetry collection to benefit victims of the Sichuan Earthquake in China in 2008. Her first collection, Stretching the Window, was published in February 2008.

write with the tv on
building the houses
finance the education
save the nation
fraud the credit
use my number
file a claim
get a new card
find a new password
keep it a secret
forget about it
fall in the house of still
the tall frame no blame
listening to a voice within
the secret number
the subway train
the snow is god
and the snow is falling

by Jeremy Gaulke

we found whiskey in bottles
without labels
in charred ruins and secret places
draped in rust and toadstools

we knew they were there but could never see them
but we prayed for them
and left the whiskey
in the ruins off the road
adorned in rust and natures squalor
to make them mad
to make them strong
to make new gods of slaughter

My Neighbour Has a New Girlfriend

every first time that I’ve done them.

Valerie Webber
In her own write: Valerie is a reluctant academic and proud smut peddler. She has lived in Montreal since abandoning her maritime home 7 years ago. When not writing she alphabetizes her cd collection, chews the skin around her fingernails, and shamelessly indulges in legal drama television. She generally shares too much information concerning genitals, her own or otherwise. Previous work includes thin little arms build castles (big baby books) and lignin diadem with Genevieve Dellinger (big baby books, rain ridge press & glasseye books co-publication ).

we pray
for bigger mouths

Travis Catsull, from Year of the Girl

Other books by Catsull include Open Spirit and Isle of Asphalt from Effing Press in Austin. Catsull is the editor/founder of Haggard and Halloo and co-founder of The Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band Which won the Austin Chronicle’s choral CD of the year award in 2008 for The Golden Calves.

During the 1960s, when half of America was a race riot and an anti-war demonstration, the great musician Merle Haggard made a famous song called “Okie from Muskogee” in which he sang, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, a place where even squares can have a ball.”

Now, forty-five years later, it turns out Haggard is a pothead. From the Jan 1, 2009 New York Times:

Merle Haggard plans to give his first concerts since undergoing surgery for lung cancer two months ago, Reuters reported. In a special twist, Mr. Haggard, 71, said that for the first time in his life he would perform without having first smoked tobacco or marijuana. Notwithstanding a jab at pot smokers in his 1969 hit “Okie From Muskogee,” Mr. Haggard has long indulged a marijuana habit of his own. [He gave up a few times over the years, but "nothing was funny," he said.] Having now put it aside, he said, he expects to work harder in 2009. The concerts are set for Friday and Saturday in his hometown, Bakersfield, Calif.

It’s okay to be a hypocrite, but I think the heads of the 1960s are owed an apology, as the Okie song was just one more stupid stanza in a drug and culture war that, guess what, we are about to win! How did marijuana get legalized? Because they don’t have 120 million jail cells vacant at any one time.

So…

The Dope from Muskogee
for Merle Haggard

If you live long enough
You’ll get to see everything
Turned inside out.

Turns out the “Okie from Muskogee”
Turned into the Pothead from Bakersfield
With no apology yet foreseen
For the damage hippy hating did to this
Defunct Vietnam War torn country.

Pot smokers take turns
Passing their joints around.
Merle must have at least one song
In his tuckerbag to extol
The virtues of Marijuana over Valium:
Please pass the music.

Put him on the train for the
Medical uses of Marijuana
Recreation without drugs
Is hardly recreation at all.

—Charles Potts

For slinging truth directly to despotic criminal power in a heroic, selfless act of CONTEMPORARY conscience and righteousness, an act that many others could have done but none dared, Iraqi journalist/shoe-thrower Muntader al-Zaidi is the clear choice for Arthur Magazine’s coveted “Man of the Year” award for 2008.

In honor of the occasion, Charles Potts has composed a new poem, “Balls Out,” which we proudly present here:

Balls Out
for Muntader al-Zaidi

We’ve found Hitler’s missing testicle
Lodged in George W. Bush’s nose.
Yes ladies and gentlemen
George Bush was snorting Nazi Nuts
When one of them got stuck in the cocaine.

Muntader al-Zaidi attempted a seasonal variation on
Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Sweet
With his shoes.

He really wanted to hit the visiting fascist in the face
The lame duck occupational Caesar of the colony of Iraq
To crack the American crackpot empire
With his shoes.

George Bush ducked al-Zaidi’s flying shoes
Just like he ducked
Every single other responsibility of the office he stole.

Duck this George:

Since the nefarious democrats didn’t have balls enough to
Impeach you,
al-Zaidi impeached you with his shoes.

The Muntader al-Zaidi College of Journalism at Yale
Now open for admission.

We owe you a pension al-Zaidi.
We are all in prison
Until you are set free.

—Charles Potts

To go with the case of Chivas Regal.
I am the first vice president of the United States
To actually be the president of the United States
Simultaneously, but really I am
President of the Senate and in the legislative branch
So subpoenaing me about documents related to executive privilege
Will be futile since I am between branches
No law actually covers me
And everything the president does, as Nixon said, is legal.
Like conservatives everywhere
I hate and fear the government except when we can milk it like
The cash cow it is.
Since I am the government
I hate and fear myself.
And you wonder why I’m trying to keep it a secret.

The US government became paranoid with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, which made government a secret. This made everybody who might want to know what the government is up to an enemy, from whom the truth must be kept at all costs. Are 16 spy agencies enough? Why not 24? or 56?

Christianity is a comfort religion for chimpanzees without the nerve to die decently. They want to drag everybody through their Armageddon–worse than a Mel Gibson movie.

And Fascism, well the 20th century was a hundred million death essay in the futility of invading neighboring countries just because you can. Adios Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Mussolini’s “Government by Corporations” Fascism. The adult countries of Europe and Asia will have to help put the kibosh on the PCF US Empire.

With any luck the empire will collapse in time for all of us to watch. While the Vichy Democrats have decided to ratify the Bush strategy to run out the clock and blame all their failures on subsequent and former administrations (I mean where the fuck is Congressman Conyers’ bill for impeachment?), our obligation is to not help them kill any innocent bodies and to stay out of the way of the debris from falling empire.

Or as Edward Dorn just said: If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.

Peace