what comes is better than what came before


Sarah Nesbit, Walking Home, 2006

Stars
-- by Freya Manfred

What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on,
just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm falling
toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes.

No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the President's
a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're
cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless.

I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers.
I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears,
my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind.

But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane,
or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say,

"I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen.
Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside
I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, pulsing,
each star so close to the next and yet so far away.

Oh, the stars. In lines and curves, with fainter, more mysterious
designs beyond, and again, beyond. The longer I look, the more I see,
and the more I see, the deeper the universe grows.

I have a long way to go, and I'm starting now --
out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside.


Speed, a Pastoral
-- by John Forbes

it’s fun to take speed
& stay up all night
not writing those reams of poetry
just thinking about is bad for you
— instead your feelings

follow your career down the drain
& find they like it there
among an anthology of fine ideas, bound together
by a chemical in your blood
that lets you stare the TV in its vacant face
& cheer, consuming yourself like a mortgage
& when Keats comes to dine, or Flaubert,
you can answer their purities
with your own less negative ones — for example
you know Dransfield’s line, that once you become a junkie
you’ll never want to be anything else?

well, I think he died too soon,
as if he thought drugs were an old-fashioned teacher
& he was the teacher’s pet, who just put up his hand
& said quietly, ‘Sir, sir’
& heroin let him leave the room.



(In DC? Story/Stereo #3 is tonight at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, 8:00 PM sharp. The music: Zomes (Asa Osborne of Lungfish). The writers: Dylan Landis (Normal People Don’t Live Like This) and Brian Gilmore (Elvis Presley is Alive and Well and Living in Harlem). More info at Storystereo.)

I want to grow up and be a debaser


Isa Genzken, Basic Research, 1989

Where They Were and What They Were Doing
-- by Matt Cook

I was looking through Milwaukee newspapers
From the day after John F. Kennedy was shot—

There was this auto body worker
Who brought his BB gun to work that day;
He was arrested for shooting his BB gun
Out the windows of the body plant
At passing automobiles—

That's where he was and what he was doing
On the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

There was this biochemist.
He was giving this speech at some university in town—
He was inviting the audience to imagine
A strain of pneumonia bacteria
That was wearing a heavy armor suit that was actually made ofprotein—
That was his public speaking metaphor.
His point was that the protein would act like
A shield against white blood cells.
That's what that guy was up to that day.

And just outside of town somewhere,
A car slammed into a truck on a rainy highway.
The car guy died of head injuries;
The truck guy was in satisfactory condition with neck pain.

In satisfactory condition with neck pain—
That's where that guy was, and what he was doing.

The day President Kennedy was shot,
These kids broke into a junior high school.
They stole twenty dollars worth of stamps,
And smashed up an aquarium.

That was their story;
That's where they were and what they were doing.


The Surgeon
-- by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

I was still a kid
interning at State
he reminisces late in the meal—
It was a young red-headed woman
looked like my sister
when the lines went flat
I fell apart
shook
like a car with a broken axle
Went to the head surgeon
a fatherly man
Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard
before you know this business
and you just did row one, plot one.


Diagnosis
-- by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

how can one ever think anythings permanant


Lisa Law, Nico, 1967

* The lobbyist new gravy-train? High-speed rail. excerpt:

"High-speed rail is Washington’s latest potential bonanza, it seems, and that $8 billion dollars — just for starters — is attracting lots of attention. In fact, an examination by The Center for Public Integrity found that more than 50 public and private groups explicitly lobbied on high-speed rail policy last quarter — a three-fold increase from a year ago. Even that number fails to capture dozens of other actors likely lobbying on high-speed rail that keep their specific lobbying targets as vague as Washington does its spending plans."
...
"But for K Street, it’s “all aboard.” General Electric turned heads this summer by hiring Linda Hall Daschle, previously the Federal Aviation Administration’s Deputy Administrator — and wife of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle — to lobby on rail. Signing up such an influential Washington player — just last month the Daschles hosted a fundraiser for House Transportation chairman James Oberstar’s political action committee — suggested one of the world’s largest companies sees real opportunities. Last week the firm announced an agreement with China that would allow GE to pursue American projects using Chinese rail technology.

“'There will be a lot of consultants all over this stuff,' says consultant Gillespie, who got his rail start while working for Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania and then Amtrak. 'There already are.'”

"The 50-plus groups that filed last quarter as explicitly lobbying on high-speed rail include labor unions such as the AFL-CIO and big freight railroads such as BNSF Railway, as well as supply companies, transit agencies, 15 cities and counties, and even the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Law and lobby firms Patton Boggs and Ball Janik represent many of the local governments, while others, such as Kelley, Drye & Warren lobby, for specific rail-interested niche groups such as the steel industry."

* NFL films' Steve Sabo says the wiring of Lions' QB Matthew Stafford was most dramatic ever. Watch the clip, Sabo would know.

* "Dance is the hidden language of the soul." -- Martha Graham

every single thought is like a punch in the face


Ross Bleckner, Flowers, 2004

* The history of the hockey mask.

* Want to buy my house?

* The world's largest collection of tongue twisters.

* "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." -- Pablo Picaso

over the river and through the woods



A Thanksgiving Prayer
-- by William bourroughs

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.


--- back Monday

Lately, my heart is made of gravy


Lynn Cazabon, Uncultivated, 2008

* Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin and the culture war. excerpt:

"Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

"Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

"The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring.

"Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or not, but at least he tries. The poor guy nearly killed himself this summer trying to find enough horseshit to arm himself with against the health care bill, coming up with various fairy tales about how state health agencies used death panels to try to kill cancer patients who just wanted to live a little longer, how section 1233 is Auschwitz all over again, yada yada yada.

"Rush is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

"Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick."

* William Burroughs on the worst possible method of withdrawl. excerpt:

“Prolonged Sleep.--The theory sounds good. You go to sleep and wake up cured. Industrial doses of chloral hydrate, barbiturates, thorazine, only produced a nightmare state of semi-consciousness. Withdrawal of sedation, after 5 days, occasioned a severe shock. Symptoms of acute morphine deprivation supervened. The end result was a combined syndrome of unparalleled horror. No cure I ever took was as painful as this allegedly painless method. The cycle of sleep and wakefulness is always deeply disturbed during withdrawal. To further disturb it with massive sedation seems contraindicated to say the least. Withdrawal of morphine is sufficiently traumatic without adding to it withdrawal of barbiturates. After two weeks in the hospital (five days sedation, ten days "rest") I was still so weak that I fainted when I tried to walk up a slight incline. I consider prolonged sleep the worst possible method of treating withdrawal."

* ""There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened." -- Dr. J

Do You Remember Me, Like I Remember You


Ford Beckman, POP Rhythm Orange and Black, 2008

* The Disappearance of Ford Beckman: How a Celebrated American Artist was Forced to Trade his Multi-million dollar Collection for a Job Selling Donuts. Read it.

* List: Fifteen greatest acts of rock rebellion.

* "Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." -- Frank Zappa

I don't like these drugs anymore


Greely Myatt, I gotta learn to talk (detail), 2006

Opus 21
-- by William Kloefkorn

How satisfying to have gone to a concert
featuring someone now famous you have broken
bread with. There was music, too, in the way

she lifted her fork to her mouth, music in the fork
that delivered the music that was the food
to sustain her. I meanwhile hum along

with the breeze that plays the oak leaves
like the fretted instrument my mother refused
to buy me. Obviously, I am looking

for something more than a mother to lay the wreaths
of my imperfections at the foot of. The bread
she baked was worth far more than the price

of forgiveness. In the kitchen its aroma
continues to drive me insane. In Gilead there is
neither sustenance nor balm. William, you should

stop your whining and buy yourself a good used
violin. Your audience cannot sit
silent on its hands forever, now can it.


My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing
-- by William Kloefkorn

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.


Ludi Jr. Sits Quietly Through The Passing Along of His Father's Advice
-- by William Kloefkorn

do not shoot the rabbit
through either its good eye
or the one that most offends vou
do not sit too easily
in the lap of you
know who I mean
return the air freshener
the comicbooks the lifesavers
to the drugstore
remember one of the following:
father mother
do not neglect
the days of the calendar
that bar of soap
you carved the other night:
shred it like ripe cabbage
into the throat of the drain
do not want the words
that the unkind give you
do not tell betty jean's mother
what under betty jean's underwear
is growing
remember this trinity
to keep it holy:
blood is sour
and verily verily
when the dark asks you
say no

it's nice to be liked
but it's better by far to be paid


Cao Fei, A Mirage, 2004

* Aaron Leitko takes a look at the Twitter account of Matador Records' Chris Lombardi.

* "I never think of the future - it comes soon enough." -- Albert Einstein

the infrastructure rots
and the owners hate the jocks


Carol Diehl, All These Things That I've Done, 2008

Three poems by Frannie Lindsay:

To November

Here you come before we have had any time
to take our solemn coats our hats that itch back out
of the naphthalene dark you glide as though you believed
our gusty scarves and the flags of our breath
were welcoming you here you come with nothing
to love except your own vibrant bleakness

sweeping the birds with your stern stroke of hay
wide is your intent on songlessness
oh husher of all that has ever beseeched
oh nearsighted pipe-metal noon
puller of smoke from the unready chimneys
are you not at once reluctance and hastened departure

with nowhere to go except every north-facing stoop
each complaining screen door in which a tired wife
has just given up waiting I offer you this
lashed bundle of all that is still
too damp to burn


The Thrift Shop Dresses

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet
a little while among the throng of flowered dresses
you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases
on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness
and even though you’d be alive a few more days
I knew they were ready to let themselves be
packed into liquor store boxes simply
because you had asked that of them,
and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army
without having noticed me
wrapping my arms around so many at once
that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger
as if to return the embrace.


Urn

Her brow and knees,
her brain

and womb and ruined heart,
her bowing arm,

and breasts that fed
no one, the foot that hurt,

the cheek
her father struck,

all burned
together: soot, light snow

the spring that she
was born.