MOUNDZ

Campaigning Where the Sidewalk Ends

2011-09-23T07:23:00.000-04:00

The sky roars overhead as a passenger jet slowly tumbles downward towards the runway with all the grace of a flying Greyhound bus. It’s Saturday morning at Mark Poloncarz for Erie County HQ, a massive vacant storefront chosen for its acreage of windows facing a busy section of Harlem Road in the Town of Cheektowaga. Volunteer coordinator Ben Swanekamp is there in a t-shirt, ball cap, and black-frame glasses. He cuts a diminutive figure and is the youngest person I’ve seen at a campaign event all season. Mark Poloncarz, at a previous event, announced to us all that Ben was the numbers guy, the guy not only responsible for volunteers, but ultimately responsible for where to volunteer and to whom volunteers should reach.

This morning he’s sending out volunteers to go door-to-door in targeted areas to talk to “non-prime” Democrats—registered Democrats who typically eschew primaries and are thus viewed as potentially undecided. He hands me a folder full of printouts, maps, and directions. On most sheets there are names, ages, gender, and addresses of the fair-weather Democrats with little boxes to check based on how they respond to my suggestion they vote for Poloncarz. There’s even a box to check for the politically disillusioned. “You know, if they say all politicians are crooks,” Ben explains, “and I’m not voting for anybody. We see more and more of that each year.”

Included in the packet is a stump question to pose to voters: “Are you sick of politicians making promises they break or cannot grant once they are elected? Me too…” Here’s where I overestimate my charisma and make up my mind not to follow the script, expecting to win people over by being a good guy and smiling, a decision I would second-guess all day. But I see the wisdom of the prescribed hook, and that it’s based on what most be a common objection to political campaigns, the kind of thing your Aunt Shirley is always complaining about.

Campaigning is never about history, and it’s even less about facts. Most people are either confused by the facts, or they realize that both sides of the debate seem to invent the facts to their advantage. More than anything, politics is about emotion: Can the candidate give the voter a good feeling? One elderly woman revealed this to me perfectly, when I asked her where she came down on the two candidates. “I don’t know,” she said. “I like both.”

Many voters frankly don’t care enough about politics (to be fair, politics doesn’t always give folks reasons to care) to know that the current Erie County Executive Chris Collins has pursued a series of ill-fated and taxpayer-funded lawsuits against any entity that would dare oppose him; that he cut back on county attorneys to funnel money to an outside law firm that contributes to his campaign and called it a win for taxpayers; that he self-aborted his own campaign for governor by making anti-Semitic and sexist remarks; that the Erie County Holding Center has been fatally deficient in recognizing mental illness and drug withdrawal symptoms, leading to an unprecedented rash of suicide and a subsequent lawsuit by the Department of Justice; and that, when Collins finally agreed to terms to improve conditions and settle the case, he declared victory in a press conference, proudly declaring that the taxpayer had persevered a menacing attack by the feds. And he looked good doing it.

He also thought he looked good making cuts to cultural institutions and libraries, but the first person I talked to was particularly galvanized by this action. “I’m here to see if you’re considering voting for Mark Poloncarz?” I asked.

“Oh, you mean anti-Collins? I talked to some Poloncarz people at the Elmwood Arts Festival and told them the only way I’m not voting for Poloncarz is if he kills somebody between now and the election.”

It was a good start to the day, but it was not an indicator of any success to come. As I combed through the names and addresses and knocked on doors to palatial and pedestrian homes alike, I was usually met with silence. No one home, no one coming to the door, and almost no neighborhood noise. Suburban quiet: only the dim hum of the Youngmann Expressway and the occasional jet heading into the same airport, but on a different flight path, than those blessing the airspace over Poloncarz HQ.
I knock on strange doors as part of my day job at times, but it never really gets any easier, and the unease, I soon find out, is completely reciprocal. Out of the 40 doors I knocked on, I was lucky to talk to 15 people, often not even the apostate Democrat on my list. And out of those 15, half of them were flustered, angry, or just couldn’t be bothered.

In the internet age, going door-to-door is going the way of snail mail correspondence: a lost but somehow still valid art. It’s hard for me not to feel solidarity with the postman I see doing Saturday delivery, and I was tempted to hand him one of my handsome Mark Poloncarz placards. But at least he wears a government uniform. I’m dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans, but I feel like a media criminal stereotype: as in the smooth con man. I talked to one woman who nervously told me from behind her screen door she would probably vote for Poloncarz, but I think she would have said anything to get me off her porch. I know from my own childhood that unexpected knocks on the door either meant Jehovah’s Witnesses or one of the last American door-to-door salesmen. Even as a well-mannered white man, I found out Saturday that even selling nothing was a hard sell. I passed three men doing yard work within feet of me and they all avoided eye contact entirely, as if a pedestrian carrying a clipboard was an everyday occurrence in those parts. Pedestrians are a rare breed to begin with out here; I traversed one residential street in Amherst where the sidewalk was inexplicably absent for sections on both sides of the street.

When I returned to Poloncarz HQ, Ben Swanekamp told me what I had seen is normal. That the contact rate is generally around 25 percent, the same chance of flipping a coin twice and getting heads both times. An older man intercepted me on one driveway while his adult son mowed the lawn. He told me he didn’t know how his son was voting and that he himself had moved to Florida. I told him that was too bad as another jet lumbered overhead. “No it’s not,” he said, smiling.

Tailgate to the Max

2011-09-13T19:21:00.001-04:00

Associate Eric Gelsinger as Spielman

It’s September 11, 2011, but I almost forget today is the 10th anniversary of the day that has made September 11 meaningful, because it coincides gracefully with opening day of the NFL season, a sport that is slowly becoming more cultural ritual than mere entertainment. This is evident in my station wagon: My associate and I are decked in Bills jerseys and pondering how bad the team might be this year. Being a Bills fan is like being an intrepid explorer of your own emotional pain. Every year you wait for things to get better and every year you’re rewarded with mind-boggling losses and a sense of lost time. Most chapters in the Buffalo football story read like biblical afflictions—like Job scraping his sores with shards of pottery.

Today’s destination is the annual “tailgate: fundraiser at Macaroon’s Nite Club on the eastern edge of Cheektowaga just before it gives way to Depew. Macaroon’s is nestled inconspicuously in an aging strip mall, the largest tenant of which appears to the Buffalo City Mission Thrift Store. Bars in strip malls have never made sense to me, but this bar operates as a hybrid neighborhood sports bar during the week and a thrasher rock bar on “Fridaze” and “Saturdaze.” They have Blue and Michelob Light on tap and the event calendar Xerox advertises a band called “That 80’s Hair Rock Band” and that you can get a drink for less than $3 pretty much any day of the week. Today our drinks are free, courtesy of the Progressive Democrats of Cheektowaga. At the entrance we are handed a cup and told that “it is good for vodka, rum, and beer, but not all at once.”

The bar is deep, dark, and large. It’s a “Nite Club,” after all. When we walk in around 12:30pm the cavernous room is sparsely populated by around 50 people, half that number being seniors seated at long tables toward the darkened stage area in back. Strong screwdrivers in hand, my associate goes off to mingle, and I go meet the man of the hour, Frank Max.

Perhaps everyone in Erie County has an uncle who looks and talks like Frank Max, chair of Cheektowaga’s Democratic Party. He cuts a classic, Western New York middle-aged man figure, and he’s brimming with blue-collar vitality. Frank tells me he has run for office in the past, but sees himself now as more of a behind-the-scenes organizer, someone who can rally the troops and send them door-to-door in favor of Democratic candidates in the Town of Cheektowaga, and he hopes to do something similar in Erie County if Len Lenihan’s long-anticipated descent from the chairmanship ever occurs. But today’s fundraiser is “about hanging out, watching football, and nothing too political,” he says.

Frank, however, doesn’t mince words when it comes to his prospective bid for Lenihan’s seat, saying he’s the dark horse, outside the inner circle of the party who seem bent on handing the job to Tonawanda’s John Crangle. Max maintains he is the Ryan Fitzpatrick to Crangle’s Trent Edwards of last year’s Bills: If you let the committee members vote, he says, “he can’t beat me.

Frank’s troops slowly filter in to the bar and fill the place. The majority of folks are friends, family, and co-workers, who is currently the crew chief of Cheektowaga’s sanitation department. One younger sanitation worker at the bar declares he’s not too interested in politics; he’s just here for Frank. This is a Frank Max home crowd, a Cheektowaga Democratic lovefest. There’s a smattering of elected officials: Mark Poloncarz, dressed better than anyone in the room, is present at the beginning, working his base; Legislator Tom Mazur makes an appearance; and several judges are no doubt lurking in the offing. My associate strikes up a lengthy conversation with Dick Wipperman, the Buffalo-bred heavyweight who fought some big names like Joe Frazier and still loves talking fighting. On the matter of his attendance at today’s festivities, he’s rather unclear. He doesn’t seem interested in football and he doesn’t admit to any political passion. He’s just glad to be there.

I ask Frank Max his opinion of the team. He says that he thinks they’re on the right path, they’re turning the corner, the light at the end of the tunnel, plenty of room for optimism, etc. Of course, he adds, the team is ineptly run and dysfunctional, but the players have a lot of heart. As I look around the room at the neon guitar-shaped lights and ponder the political situation in Western New York, the refrain rings familiar.

Frank Max at Macaroon's

Before kickoff, CBS airs a pregame memorial to 9/11, and the bar crowd, led by the seniors in back, stand in silence and look in different directions at whichever one of the 17 screens is closest. After the awkward 30 seconds of television patriotism are over, during which I can’t decide whether to place my hand over my heart, take my cap off, or both (I do neither), we head over to one of the back tables to join the heart of the party. There we are informed that this large group, comprising mostly senior citizens, belongs to the Cheektowaga Patriotic Commission, an official town organization without political affiliation. Bills fans, though.

The Bills force a fumble on the opening kickoff, and with smoke still lingering over the field from the pregame ceremony, the Bills launch a short touchdown drive. The place starts rocking and the Bills never really look back.

Office Call

2011-08-30T20:44:00.003-04:00

Health care is good.

Health care is important.

Been having lower back pain for almost ten years, of varying intensity.

Somewhere I decided or it was recommended or I was compelled to see a Podiatrist.

I’ve always been scared of the podiatrist, having seen one years ago with a deeply Germanic name like Mohnenberger and the pain he inflicted on my feet filled me with dread my teenage mind unfairly associated with Nazi experimentation.

I arrive on time and proffer my ID and insurance card to the receptionist.

I fill out the new patient paperwork. Under “Are you pregnant or do you expect to be pregnant” I enter yes, just to see if they notice I’m not a woman.

I’m ushered into a very small exam room and told to sit on the exam chair and remove my shoes and socks.

The chair is small and uncomfortable and makes my back hurt. It feels likes something made in the 1950s, when people were smaller. She raises it up so that I’m sitting in a ridiculous position with my naked feet pointing directly at the receptionist in the next room.

The sterile paper my feet rest on will not stay put and keeps sliding around.

The doctor arrives and proceeds in a workman-like manner to process the patient, ie me. It’s all about getting me in and out.

He has me stand and he tells me I over-pronate. I have to ask him to explain this.

He tells me the best thing to do is to get inserts to place in shoes. He tells me they cost $35 and then $25 to place in my shoes.

He goes about it, fumbling in the closet I can see between my feet looking for the inserts which he measures and cuts using my shoes and feet as his yardsticks.

It is only then that I realize I will be charged $60 for this.

He puts them in my shoes and tells me to come back in a week, and bring him my other shoes.

Chris Drury in Hockey Heaven

2011-08-20T14:19:00.002-04:00

courtesy of ohforfun.typepad.com

Where do great athletes go when they retire? The well-trodden paths are broadcasting and business, supplemented by charity events, speaking engagements, golf tournaments, and sporting events where a piece of them still belongs. Am I the only one who hates it when athletes retire and then immediately hit the broadcasting booth where they just smile on TV and yuk it up and don't offer any more insight than Uncle Dave would after a six-pack? OK, exceptions are Charles Barkley and Cris Collinsworth, but for everyone else there's a large disconnect to me as a sports fan. My relationship to the player ends after he stops doing what he does best, playing a stupid game. It's just hard to imagine that the guy in your TV wearing a suit and tie and breaking down a play has anything to do with the guy you watched, in Chris Drury's case, play with more guts and magic than anyone you've ever seen. Chris Drury has announced he's retiring from hockey while spending time with his ghosts in Williamsport, PA., the site of his legendary and improbable Little League World Series performance in 1989, where he pitched a 5-hit complete game shutout of Taiwan and added two runs-batted-in.

Drury was a special, once in a lifetime player. Never the fastest, never the hardest shot, certainly never the biggest, and never really an elite scorer, he formed (along with Danny Briere) the leadership of a team that came a period away from a Stanley Cup showdown with Edmonton in 2006. But he made up for all his physical limitations by being heady, not making mistakes, and scoring exactly when the team needed it. I don't know if there's been a better clutch scorer in recent hockey history than Chris Drury. Sports Illustrated's S.L. Price had this to say about Drury in 2007:

Drury is, in fact, one of the greatest clutch players in sports. Ever. At 13 he led Trumbull, Conn., to its shocking win over mighty Taiwan in the 1989 Little League World Series, five months after helping his Greater Bridgeport Pee Wee hockey team win the '89 amateur national championship. Ever since, the wins and the honors have rolled in like boxcars: a state hockey title in high school, an NCAA title his freshman year at BU, the Hobey Baker Award as the nation's best hockey player, the Calder Trophy as the NHL's top rookie. Hardly a prolific scorer, Drury knocked in four playoff game-winning goals that first year for Colorado, and two seasons later, stepping out of the shadows of Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg, he scored 11 goals in the Avalanche's 23-game playoff run to the 2001 Stanley Cup title. He has tallied 12 playoff game-winners -- one more than the great Lemieux -- and his four overtime goals in the postseason are tied for second most among active players.

Chris Drury's most unforgettable moments in Buffalo both came in 2007. In a February game against Ottawa, Senators head-hunter Chris Neil lowered a dirty blindside shoulder straight to Drury's head, concussing him. I remember watching this game live, the Sabres were having a magical season and went on to win the franchise's first Presidents Trophy. I remember the shot of Lindy Ruff, masking the anger of all of Buffalo in his bright red angry pumpkin face, audibly yelling at Ottawa coach (Brian Murray?) "DON'T GO AFTER OUR FUCKING CAPTAIN!!" Of course Briere and Drury were co-captains, and they complemented each other well in those roles. Briere was fiery, mercurial, flashy, outspoken. He carried grudges and was deceptively dirty, never above a spear or a high-stick. Drury almost never spoke (I can't even remember what his voice sounds like), he was never dirty, always composed, ready. But at the moment that Lindy Ruff was going all Mel Gibson from the bench, there was no doubt, in my mind at least, that Drury was the team's heart and soul.

When play resumes, Murray inexplicably throws his number one line on the ice, Spezza, Alfredsson, Heatley, a line that would carry the Sens to the Cup that year. It's hard to imagine what Murray would have been thinking, putting them out there right after the Sabres top player had been drilled by a cheap hit to the head, someone spending as much time as Murray had around hockey had to know retaliation of at least, edgy play, was on the docket immediately. Ruff wasted no time in putting Adam Mair, Andrew Peters, and Patrick Kaleta (in his NHL debut, I believe) on the ice and they in turn wasted no time in initiating one the most memorable brawls in Sabre history. Watching the replays on youtube, I'm amazed the linesman even had the chance to drop the puck, Kaleta and his man were already sparring.

The other moment came in the playoffs, a game 5 against the Rangers in Buffalo, I think the series was 2-2. A 1-0 Rangers game until late in the third when the Rangers got called for an icing with 13 seconds left. Drury won the face off, controlled the puck into the corner, feathered it out front for a shot from the slot area and headed around the other side of the net where the puck magically found his stick on a rebound that he quickly shot through traffic and into the net to tie the game 1-1. Watching the play even now makes the hair on my neck stand up. The Sabres were the winningest team in hockey that year but something had been missing in the playoffs, they looked flat and didn't seem as dominant as the team that lost to Carolina in Game 7 of the Conference Finals the year before. This Drury goal was the first moment I thought that Buffalo had a shot to win that year. I've been watching hockey for twenty years or so, and it's so rare to see a player with that combination of determination and luck. Drury has always been a kind of phantom on the ice, magically disappearing and reappearing exactly where he needed to be at the right time

But where does Drury go now? He's not that old but his knees are bad enough that no team wanted to sign him, forcing his hand into retirement. It was hard enough watching him leave Buffalo due to incompetent ownership, he's the kind of player that as a fan you just wait 20 years for someone like that to be on your team. It's hard for me to believe that Drury's done, though I know if he says he's done, he's not going to pull a Forsberg or Favre, he's done. With hockey. I watched his last regular season game, Rangers vs Devils. Drury had been almost the entire year due to injury, and coming back at the end of the season, you knew he was playing through pain, trying to get his legs under him to help for the Rangers push into the playoffs. He scored a magnificent goal, charging the net and falling to his knees to shovel one by Brodeur. Vintage Drury, half-dead coming from nowhere to do something necessary but totally unexpected, every time.

Somewhere in the digital collection, I have a talk by the poet David Antin in which he explicates his notion of poetic line as being something extra-literary. It's part of his whole vision, of course, of poetry being something more than just "that literary form defined as having line breaks." He ends up describing a friend of his who ended up pursuing three of four drastic career and life changes, from bohemian artist to housewife to marathon runner to mathematician (I'm probably losing some of the exact facts, but that's the outline). I hope Chris Drury's next turn is equally great, and that none of us will expect it when it happens.

Walkings

2011-08-18T22:28:00.001-04:00

The humidity has sharply decreased so that now the day's heat just feels hot and lovely and there's been this inspired wind blowing through. Great day for the sailboats. Not a great day for the garbage-pickers who dare enter the Erie Basin Marina.

I guess after you drive in from the suburbs in an air-conditioned luxury car with the windows rolled up and the doors definitely locked and you want to go get on your yacht and forget about the cruel, cruel world, the last thing you want to see someone going through your garbage. Maybe this means that the other side's bottles and cans are too refined for the vulgar process of recycling?

The nicer parts of my neighborhood (read mostly white, middle class) are littered with lawn signs for Judge Joseph Fiorella, a Buffalo City Court judge. I don't know much about the guy, except for that he's presiding over the NFTA Police vs. anti-war protesters case, and I'd surely vote for him if he can find a way to gracefully dismiss the prosecution's case. There's been a lot written about the case and there's even a Youtube video out there if you're interested in finding it, I don't want to rehash the whole story here, suffice it to say that the NFTA police played a big role in escalating a mostly innocent demonstration. So Judge, let Nate Buckley, Eliott Zyglis and Jason Wilson off, they're not trouble makers. Do that and I'll ignore the strange race-politicking found in the image on the side of your campaign utility truck parked in the neighborhood and strategically placed at the Farmer's Market on Saturdays.

Judge Fiorella wants the "People's" vote

I continue to see ash trees everywhere. I can't shake a spooky kind of feeling about them, like they're living ghosts, and whatever knowledge, intelligence, and beauty they possess, they'll never be the same.

Drove down to the foot of Smith St. tonight, known by many as the access point to the behemoth Concrete Central grain elevator on the Buffalo River. On the way, we passed that bar in the First Ward on South Park, Adolf's. Always kinda makes me wonder. Anyway, huge stands of Japanese Knotweed down there, like little bamboo trees, looking vigorous and healthy.

Buffalo Loves You Too, Lee!

2011-08-12T15:48:00.000-04:00

Early this afternoon, I received an automatic text from the local sports station, because I'm that kind of guy I guess, that "Adam Schefter of ESPN has announced the Bills have traded Lee Evans to the Baltimore Ravens." My first thought was, "Who the hell does this Adam Schefter think he is!"

Adam Schefter works for ESPN and amazingly he sometimes [ghost] writes articles [actually written by the editor], but he can by no means be mistook for a journalist. I don't know what he is. He's more of a press secretary, or a public relations puppet stooge from the Oil and Gas Industry. He's got a certain unctuous slickness to the way he talks, but it's hard to judge because so little of what he says is ever meaningful. It was brutal watching him try to report on the recent NFL Labor showdown. He would come on and say his sources are telling him the lockout could end next Tuesday and that's were the information would end. Everything else that came out of his mouth sounded like a high school gym teacher trying to describe what the negotiation process looks like: "Well the owners have put the onus back onto the players and it's really up for the players, the one who were numbers on Sunday, to see if that's what works for them. So it's a process, but I can tell you, sources on both sides of the issue tell me they are committed to a deal that works for them." Schefter is a mouthpiece for hire, a real journalist wouldn't have such unflagging trust of the money men that are his sources: agents, owners, GMs. He's a symbol of what the titanic entertainment corporation that is the NFL has become.

My second reaction to the text was "I'm going to miss Lee Evans." He was long the fastest and often most talented guy on a string of bad teams, never played in the playoffs and he still never complained or turned on anybody. The Buffalo News quotes him as "I’ve loved playing here. The fans really, really make this place special. I’ll always have ties to the Buffalo community, through the people I’ve met. And the friends I’ve made will be friends for life. It’s a fantastic place to play, a great football environment and I’ll always have ties to the community here." Well done Lee!

Falling for the Ash

2011-08-11T22:17:00.001-04:00

I found myself the other night in a full room, the "Community Room" of Philip Sheridan Elementary School in Tonawanda, NY to listen to a presentation on the Emerald Ash Borer. The room was set up like a small banquet was about to take place, like a funeral reception: 12 large round tables with eight seats placed around each one. There were maybe two empty seats by the time the presentation starting, precisely at 7 o'clock.

There's always something about a space like this that instantly puts me to sleep, just thinking about it. The exterior of the school presents as fairly modern, but the hallway betrays any hint of recent modernity and harkens back to the good old-fashioned modernity of the 50's. Analog wall clocks, that hard, argyle pattern, stone-looking flooring that every school of my youth had. The "Community Room" was a small oasis from the sterility of the hallway thanks to it's thin industrial carpet, round tables, and and a power point presentation all ready to go on a big screen. There was no huge metal pot of coffee with non-dairy powder creamer and sugar packets, but I could smell all that anyway. No giveaways, just a card for a local Department of Conservation Forrester and some informational pamphlets on the scourge, the evil one from Asia, the Emerald Ash Borer.

EAB hates Abe Lincoln

The EAB is a pretty spectacular looking insect: shiny, green and apparently made of metal. Its effect on North-Eastern ash trees of the fraxinius genus has contributed to folk speculation among my inner circle that insect is not only made of metal, but is also an alien machine programed to destroy the forests. Anyway, the insect's sparkly green coat is reminiscent of a bumper car. The DEC's number is that 7% of New York State's forests are fraxinius. and the other number to consider is the mortality rate for ash once the EAB enters an area: 100%. The Forrester, Patrick Marren, said that in an EAB-affected area in Lancaster, NY, he found larvae in trees only two inches in diameter. Once hatched, the larvae bore into the tree and consume the wires that keep the tree juiced, growing to a length of about an inch, inch and a half.

The shape that their journey through the lifelines of the tree reveal in bark is rather fascinating, I'm sure Werner Herzog would find it an example of primitive art. Wavy graffiti-seeming S-patterns made by multiple individual EAB worms intersect and loop to form what looks almost like a line-drawing of smoke. These are the marks that have ferried some 50 million ash trees of North America across to other side and will be the seal of death for many millions more.

Efforts to contain the borer have proved ineffectual, though it was announced that a EAB-loving wasp from it's home range in Northern China, Korea, Mongolia, Japan, and Eastern Russia was set to be released in the United States this month. I found this somewhat alarming and asked for the species name and if this was completely safe. I meant safe for the ecosystems, but he assumed I meant human safety. I was told they look like a "flying ant," they "don't sting," and the only eat Emerald Ash Borer, "they love'em."

The bark gallery images were the aesthetic highlight of the night. A close second was the extremely thick Buffalo version of the Northern-Cities Shift in some of the participants voices. But at the time what dominated my thoughts was that I was surprised to find no trace of nostalgia or affection for the trees and I didn't know why I felt the surprise. But I could look no further than myself, until I was shown an old-growth Ash in Allegany State Park, I don't know if I ever had ever noticed ash trees before. Turns out they are almost a text book tree and they don't have cool acorns like oak, make syrup and turn orange like maple, they smell like pine or make "stink-bombs" like Black Walnut, they don't have distinctive fruit or seeds, and they don't have interesting leaves. They are pretty easy to identify though, once you get used to looking for its spongy, furrowed bark and opposite-leafing structure (only 4 native species have opposite leaves: maple, ash, dogwood, horse chestnut).

But what is an ash tree and so what? In Tonawanda, they were comparing this to the Dutch Elm Disease and the effect it had on the region in a spirit remorseless resignation. Far as I know, there are no epic stories written about ash trees, no celebrities with ash tattoos, and no famous ash-tree painters. Ash trees biggest claim to fame is their longtime use in Major League Baseball for bats, which have since been switched out for maple. I declare the EAB as Unamerican.

Last night walking in my neighborhood looking for them and I found about a dozen ash trees, three of which were in prominent positions in front of homes, providing shade, and standing there stately and proud like only a tree can do in front of a house. I'll admit it, I'm falling in love with the ash. The spectre of their own death is helping, I want to somehow personally not just remember the trees but memorialize the them. But I also want to be able to earnestly say that I miss them one day.

Bird Island Pier

2011-08-08T22:01:00.000-04:00

At the end of Buffalo's West Side there is a concrete walkway on top of the wall that separates the Black Rock Canal from the Niagara River and extends upriver 2 miles all the way into Buffalo Harbor, where Lake Erie is suddenly channeled into a narrow stretch of nascent Niagara. Accessible at the "Foot of Ferry" street, the river there is extremely fast and powerful, suggestive of the immense violence that awaits the water about 10 miles downstream at the Falls.

It's a walking history lesson of sorts and it has at least 4 names. Broderick Park is the name of the area where the parking lot and picnic benches are, and it's named after a distant relative on my mother's side, the Brodericks. Officially it's on Squaw Island, home to Buffalo Waste Water Treatment Plant. There's also a plaque at the beginning of the pier, naming it Nowak pier, after a congressman nicknamed "The Billion Dollar Man," presumably for his skill at getting federal monies spent on Western New York projects. The kind of thing that seem unimaginable as a quality in today's politics. Locals call it simply the foot of Ferry St., an unspoken acknowledgment of area's history as a ferry launch to Fort Erie, Ontario. It's also an important site for the Underground Railroad, a place where slaves attempted to cross to freedom in Canada in Buffalo's early days.

Buffalo's Ted DiBiase

It's long been one of my favorite walks in Buffalo or anywhere, because it's surrounded by water and it just our seemingly directly into the lake and you end up with perspective you would otherwise only get on a boat. It's incredible in all seasons, though in winter the wind is punishing. Colonizing invasive plants grow readily out of the rock and concrete, with a few natives like cottonwood and sumac, and city crews cut it all back every few years to keep sight lines in tact. One summer there was a family of minks living along the pier, and towards dusk you will almost always see great blue and black-crowned night herons, as well as common terns. In spring the channel is full of migrating ducks: goldeneye, scaup, and red-breasted and hooded mergansers, pied-billed grebes, and American coots. It's not always pretty, however, one summer 8 years ago there was the carcass of a calf in the slow moving canal water, a stark contrast to the fast river on the other side. This is how I first learned of the Great Lakes monster that is the muskellunge, having seen a dead one washed up on the pier.

For over a year now, the pier has been closed past the Peace Bridge (short of the halfway point) due to a maintenance issue that is unknown to me, but I think I remember the Army Corps of Engineers being involved. It's relatively easy to get around the fence, and I'm thankful that people do. I've walked the whole thing since it's been closed and I haven't been able to note any overt structural issue with the pier that would preclude it to recreation, and it's an embarrassment to the whole city that it's still closed off. The thick band of razor wire around the base of the Peace Bridge, added since 9/11 doesn't do the pier any favors either.

My favorite aspect of taking this walk is the way it distorts time and space, probably because of the effect the water and sight lines have on you, it always feels impossible to know how far the pier actually extends and how long you've actually spent out there. I don't spend a lot of time on boats, but maybe it's something like that.

If you live in Buffalo or any Robert Moses city for that matter, you know that public areas along the water are hard to come by, and in humid weather it feels natural to go near water. Tonight there were people swimming directly behind the sign warning of sewage, and a number of walkers and fisherman had worked their way around the closed fence to get to the other side and for me it was a great thing to see. I like to think that for all its dysfunction and neglect, Buffalo is an oasis of sanity in a society inching closer every day to a fear-driven police state.

I attended a Washington Nationals game in the inaugural season of their bland new ballpark. I got to the stadium early, looking to find a place for a few drinks before the game. There was absolutely nothing there besides a large boulevard of traffic that felt like a highway. I found a corner store and bought a can of beer, but then there was no where to go. Behind the store, there were a few older neighborhood guys drinking but they didn't look friendly to company. I ended up sitting on the boulevard, hiding the beer behind my legs and taking sips when traffic was moving quicker. Fans were started showing up for the game but still no one was drinking and I felt like I was about to get nabbed at any second the whole time.

Money Drama

2011-08-04T22:02:00.001-04:00

I'm tickled silly whenever the major news media incorporates images of "The Long Faces of Wall Street" whenever the latest story of capitalism's sword edge suddenly, but not unexpectedly, cutting back the wrong way. You've seen it: the man in a blue Dickies-type suit with an American flag shoulder patch and his hand over his mouth covering his very, very concerned face, the kind of face we should all be wearing, evidently. Or there's the image of the young broker-type, in a handsome suit, looking up at a presumed digital wallboard of sinking figures, hand stretched under chin, lips pursed. I think that CNN has a stock of maybe 10 such pictures they just yank out every time this happens, it's always the same. Do yourself a favor, do a google image search of the beautiful poetic construction of "Dow Down." Here; I'll do it for you.

The thing that kills me, of course, is that these are the people who have the privilege of demonstrating an economy gone painful, and when the Dow goes back up we can ignore the plight of our cities again, the rampant poverty and inefficient services for the poor. Where are the pictures of the gleeful hedge traders today? The one's cashing in by "selling short" in a sinking market? You can bet on anything in capitalism, even on death. In the case of selling short, traders are able to make money by successfully predicting a drop in value.

Buffalo Education Blues

2011-08-03T21:24:00.001-04:00

James Williams, captain of a sinking ship

I have to admit to experiencing a general malaise before wading into the murky, piranha-infested waters that is discussing education in Buffalo. The dialogue is so vast and tainted by partisan in-fighting and incompetence on all levels and on both sides. Generally speaking, the sides a pretty well established: it's the Commissioner versus the Teacher's Union with the ineffectual school board seemingly along for the ride.

What's missing here? Oh yeah, the kids! It's no secret that Buffalo has epic statistics for school dysfunction. Chief among them are that something like 75% of black males never graduate high school and something like 50% of kids over the age of fifteen miss something like 50 days a year of school instruction. I don't have the exact figures and I want to keep this post to the point or a recent story in the news.

I want to give credit to the Buffalo News' Mary Pasciak, who has reported intelligently and diligently on education issues in Western New York. The news of the day was that James Williams plans to hire an administrator to oversee and be responsible for Buffalo's worst-performing schools in a budget-year rife with 100-some teacher layoffs (of course many of the young an eager are the first to get fired due to seniority rules). Of course the administrator would be non-union, very-well paid, and deflectionary whipping-boy for the Commissioner to pull out of his PR bag of tricks. Of course the Buffalo Federation of Teachers was all over this, and while the BTF has to admit some complicity in what can only be described as total, systematic failure, kudos to Ms. Pasciak for quoting an unnamed laid-off English teacher saying, "I can't believe someone could take a promotion when [104] teachers who work directly with children are going to get laid off. That's my shock and awe. If you can't name 10 kids who actually attend a Buffalo school, your job is not that important."

Amen. I hope recently upsurgent parent groups in the city are ultimately successful in bringing the dialogue back to kids, because there's no future here without them.

Good to See You

2011-08-03T20:55:00.001-04:00

The Face on Mars

Recently I've found myself saying or hearing one of the peculiar everyday expressions that I'm sure is gaining prestige in the conversational foreign language guides to English farewells: "Good to see you!" Hell, it's also a greeting, and I'm sure various forms of it exist in other languages as well (German for sure) so it's not something specific to English, or the American use thereof.

I'm also not entirely sure why it's starting to sound funny to me. Perhaps the sheer overuse. You repeat a word like "streetlight" 50 times in quick succession and by the 15th utterance or so, it's become merely sound, no semantic quality can poke through the cracks of something as jarring as that. But the overuse of "good to see you" is akin to the way the word "interesting" is overused in academic circles. When I was in my last year of graduate school the word lost all meaning to me, it became trite, patronizing, not because that was always the speaker's intention, but the way one kept hearing it over and over it began to lose some of its meaning. Kind of like "terrorism" and "terrorist" in today's news media.

I'm not seeking to build a diatribe against "good to see you" however, mainly because I think it's a pretty sincere expression. I know it is for me, because I generally like people and even people who are not my favorite people to see are good to see every once in a while, especially when your memory of that persons quirks may have faded somewhat, giving you new vantage to maybe learn something new. That's what it's all about.

But I'm curious as to the science of a sincere "good to see you" moment. Is there something about a person's facial signature that invokes a certain hormonal or neural response? There undoubtedly something very powerful in a smile, and I would imagine that people today smile more today than at any other point in human history. But is there something belonging to facial recognition of someone you don't often see? How often do you say it in a farewell to someone who you've barely talked to during your time in the same social setting? And really mean it? For me, it's quite often, even if by using it I secretly acknowledge "I'm pretty happy that all I had to do was look at you, because I really didn't want to listen to you."

The Job

2011-08-01T22:33:00.000-04:00

Google's #1 image for the title of this post

I had the opportunity about a month ago while camping with the family in Allegany State Park to lay down on the extra cot we put on our small porch and do some extended reading, i.e. more than an hour per sitting. I was having problems with my back and was pretty much laid up so I had some time alone with no distractions. And I read. It was maybe the most important event of my summer, from a personal growth standpoint.

I read a few hundred pages of Hunter S. Thompson magazine writing from the late 60's and early 70's, stuff I never had seen before and found terrifically fun and engaging and somehow not at all as dated as you would expect of 40 year old journalism. Maybe more specifically on Thompson later, (the synopsis being I was completely engrossed by the Ruben Salazar story and Thompson is my ideal form of a patriot, for any country) but the reason I bring the whole thing up is this notion of work, first of all, because the sentence that for some reason keeps replaying in my head, although completely unoriginal in its conception, is one in which he says writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a enjoyable, fun exercise, as opposed to all the other kind of writing he does which is strictly work, tedious work.

I am in my thirtieth year and perhaps that magic number has brought with it a very adult version self-reflection, one that would have been incomprehensible 10 years ago. Thoughts like: "Do I regret my Liberal Arts background" and "Should I just try to make a lot of money?" and "How do I make a lot of money?" and "Am I a writer or artist, deep down?"

I guess it's hard to identify with any of the two artist stereotypes: The Bohemian and the Gentry Artist. I'm married with two kids, my daughter is about to turn 10, so I've had a more adult mindset than most of my peers I guess for longer. Some of my friends are also married and with young children now too, so I guess I'm slowly not feeling so alone. But for some reason I still don't see an example for myself in so-called "Working Class" art traditions like Harvey Pekar or Darger or shit, even Kafka. I embrace my role inside my family, my role among all these terrific friends in my life, and my role in my neighborhood and community. But I work a job I don't really love and curse it at times for taking away time from the many other things I'd like to be daydreaming about, for lack of a better phrase. I enjoy my job most days and I want to do better in it (I work for our local social services department) but its work.

Years ago while an undergrad student I had a brief exchange with the poet Robert Kocik, and I was immediately curious about his other training. I had heard he was an architect. I was always encouraged, even then, when I discovered a writer who had to pay the bills doing something extra-literary, something completely mundane: Stevens, Reznikoff, Williams. My daughter was already a big part of my life and any plan for my future had to include having some level of good living for us both. I asked Kocik if he did something for money outside of poetry and he replied, "Everything is poetry. It's all related."

Now I love this thought, but I can't say I truly believe it. I think it belongs to one of the artist stereotypes in a way, like only a Bohemian or a blue-blood could even imagine that might be true. At the time Kocik told me that, I really believed it, but it was probably very soon after that while working a breakfast waiter in a chain hotel that I had a fundamental problem with it, not an objection really, just what an negotiating attorney might call a "carve-out." Everything is true, of course, maybe not, and only under certain conditions.

The bottom line is that there's work to be done to make as much of my life "count" towards "poetry" as possible, and I've been writing and feeling energized ever since my back made me slow down and sit in one place for more than 30 minutes.

Ricky Allen & Daniel Derenda

2011-03-05T13:57:00.000-05:00

I'm still thinking of the big drug bust I wrote about yesterday and the Buffalo News' coverage of the arrest of Ricky Allen. I feel a bit foolish for not realizing right away that the authorities must have contacted the News and filled them in on the impending police action, the police must have wanted his face on the first page. The News is a business, and the photograph of a disgraced community leader with no criminal record being lead out of his home by a police unit that looked like it was in training to storm Qaddafi's palace, is a big sell. I get that.

What's becoming more obvious is that the Police Commissioner, Daniel Derenda (AKA The Mayor's Boy) has a kind of personal vendetta against this man and I'd love to know what it is. This guy wasn't even the drug dealer, there were no weapons or drugs in his home. There were plenty of drugs and weapons to be found elsewhere during the raid, including the home of the brother of a deputy police commissioner, but the News presumably wasn't asked to bring their photographer along for that one.

Today Mickey Kearns was quoted in the News criticizing police brass for either (a) telling the Reorganizing Committee about the impending raids or (b) baiting Ricky Allen with the information and then nailing him on the wiretap. I'm finding it very hard to imagine a situation where (b) wasn't true.

Ricky Allen, Are You All That?

2011-03-04T23:01:00.003-05:00

Photo: Derek Gee, Buffalo News

I understand that a drug trafficking bust is a serious matter, but color me dubious as to some of the key hidden elements to this story which the is apparently the biggest story of the week for the Buffalo News. I don't get it. The News began running their online headline about the bust midday Thursday and kept on it for almost 24 hours, including a supersized headline in today's print version. Is this really that big of a deal?

I suppose the News would argue yes, being that this guy belongs on a community commission board that dialogues with police to improve relations and "reorganize," and that he may have tipped off his buddy that a raid was in the works (and this conversation was recorded, so the wiretap was running and presumably the narcos, whether they were the DEA, the BPD, or both, anticipated this relay). But there's something seedy in the media attention of this case that I can't name.

Certainly, my attitude about this wasn't helped when reading Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda's (he of the sham appointment) comments on the arrests and watching him repeat those comments verbatim at the big "drugs on the table" presser:

"He's a despicable human being, a dope dealer masquerading as a community activist."

Whenever a public figure feigns emotion or anger like this, my bullshit lamp lights up like a slot machine.

Book of Life

2011-03-04T22:31:00.002-05:00

It's hard to understate the importance of social networking in the public and private lives of the emerging global community. The myriad web sites and applications, specifically Facebook and Twitter, have created a pimply meta-interface within the visage of our teenaged world wide web, one level below or above, as the case may be, our daily interactions with technology. I've been trying to come to terms with my fear, my revulsion to Facebook in particular, though I feel this can be abstracted to all of the new social networking media. I'm on Facebook, go ahead and friend me, it just might take me a long time to sign on and confirm. It creeps me out.

I don't think the prophets had Facebook in mind when they developed the ideas around Sefer HaChaim, the great mystical book in the sky in which the names of every person who has existed (or only the righteous, I suppose) is written, but it is fast becoming exactly that. A catalogue of nearly everything innocuous and banal, from what you ate for dinner, to who you were with last Saturday, but it also tracks something much more valuable commercially than the cute pictures of your niece that you "like." It compiles your desire, what you want, where you spend for what you want, how you spend, and when you spend. The information that marketing execs have spent decades trying to hunt and gather no longer have to take surveys in the fields (or even tabulate and crunch the data), because now people are coming to them, and telling them freely and openly. If Don Draper worked at Facebook he wouldn't need to be getting so much action on the side, he'd be too busy soiling his drawers deep in the "likes" crunch room.

The user-driven technologies of the internet are without doubt the most purely democratic system in our daily playlist. We choose the information we like, we custom our usage to our usage like savants. The recent revolutions and mass political actions in Iran and Egypt were fueled and to a great extent organized on Facebook and Twitter. I imagine similar events from here on will follow them down that road. But there's no way for me to feel innocent about Facebook, and that's an increasingly important value to me. Maybe innocent isn't the word, I have been trying to find a single word that best describes a "lack of cynicism" in something.

The least rational side to my distrust of social networking is the paranoia that virtual communication, interaction, relationship-building will replace the old model. I say least rational because I know a full replacement is impossible and because this taking this attitude instantly strikes me as phony, like the way people always lament about how when they were kids they respected adults. But I think it's real. I belong to probably the first of many generations where there were people in your circle of friends who really weren't friends as much as virtual friends. People who shared your interests and values but who did the bulk of their communication electronically and when confronted in person they were awkward, if not altogether baffling and off-putting. I'm certain there's been people like this in former times, but I'm less certain as to whether these folks had to force themselves into actual talking with others, or if they were total loners. Whatever the case, both groups, if there are two, belong to the virtual world now. And they're allowed to become quite successful I imagine despite the fact.

I think the biggest difference between a virtual friend and a real friend, one with shared common experience and much conversation on divers matters, is that a real friend can be counted on to help you move your shit into a new place, and a virtual friend will at best respond with their regrets on Facebook.

The largest source of my cynicism for social media et al, as argued in part above, is the issue of ownership. I think the trap is that Facebook's interface lures you into thinking that when you're signed on, you're in a space of your own creation, when in reality you've sold and you are in the process of selling to Facebook more detailed information that you've ever given to any private company, all for free. I have Facebook friends who are otherwise some of the most strident critics of capitalism but when that pastel blue fills the screen they get weak in the knees and jump in, with their own apparent complete lack of cynicism.

President's Day

2011-02-21T09:29:00.002-05:00

It's President's Day and I don't have to go to work. It's hard to think of a better thing to read on such a day than David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, "This is Water."

"The fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life or death importance."

Wallace's basic argument is that it is a heroic accomplishment to live a thoughtful life, without either sinking into the dead zone, which has probably been my personal mantra for the past seven years or so, without my knowing it.

"And I submit that this what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead."

There are some absolutely bone-chilling moments in the text: the two references to suicide and the supermarket analogy which is inevitably true on some level for all of us, the myriad ways in which we all posit our selfs not only at the center of experience but at the center of all life. I've long wondered about this, what it is exactly that has made shows like American Idol such a extreme success. There are several reasons, perhaps, but none greater than exploiting our grandiose ideas of ourselves. We are all born with an innate ability for language and the quasi-expectation that we are individually on the verge of fame.

"Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation."

Contemporary life (in the civilization of the supermarket), taken as whole, is a series of isolating and lonely events forming a vacuum in which to be eagerly voyeuristic about as your personal surrogate performs to the delight of of the multitudes (even the losers of the show have broken the threshold of TV-fame).

Wallace goes to great efforts to say he is not trying to patronize the audience with moralizing advice. But the fact remains that through his thinking one finds an amazing ethic, both in terms of the work performed and the transparent honesty. Perhaps this is buttressed by a friend of mine who runs a literary organization and hosted Wallace for a reading in the early 2000s. Wallace was adamant about not receiving an honorarium, he only wanted his travel expenses and his hotel covered. He refused, even, to allow my friend to pay for his lunch.

I don't think this is worthy of sainthood, and I do encourage writers to have their meals comped when offered, but I do believe that this is part of what makes Wallace's non-fiction (I'm scared by his fiction!) so singular.

Outside of Society

2010-11-07T16:58:00.002-05:00

I was born in 1980 but I've read and heard a lot about Patti Smith and this specific record's influence on music and poetry. I came to Patti Smith through R.E.M., who I wrote about in an earlier, but recent post, and the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, which was also my introduction to Leonard Cohen.

I got a great birthday present: a new record player. I've had the same record player/3 cd changer/dual cassette player/am-fm tuner since I was 15. I bought it off my friend Tim for $100, maybe less. But it was sweet for along time. The CD changer stopped working a long time ago, the cassette player got touchy, but the record player kept crooning. It's long been the only function I've used the machine for, even though it started squeaking and the sound quality was what you would expect on a 20 year old Samsung machine with a needle that's never been changed.

I listened to the first side of this record today and it was nice to come back to it. I've always known it was great, and it's great to reacquaint oneself with greatness. It also made me a little sad that it still sounds so groundbreaking and inspiring, because I feel the vision the music creates for the world is still only a vision. It's like touring one of Buffalo's Frank Lloyd Wright houses: they're unique, novel, slick, but ultimately empty-feeling because the project's endgame is never realized. Wright wanted cooler looking buildings, Patti Smith wanted a much cooler society.

But at least with "Easter," the society is imagined in the music. Not literally in the lyrics, but in the feeling. I can't imagine how exciting it must have been to come home with this record in 1978 and throw it on the player. It's still exciting now. And for what it's worth, I can't imagine too many current day songwriters to name a song "Rock N Roll Nigger."

Literary Theory

2010-10-24T15:48:00.001-04:00

My daughter got a gift card recently for Barnes and Nobles [sic] so on a rainy Saturday out we drive to the Heartland expressways treeless boulevards big stores. Rainy day and lots of traffic. Made for some competitive driving on the wide streets and parking lots of the Heartland.

I've never seen Glenn Beck, don't need to. I know he's much more of a businessman than a journalist. The back of his book touts it as being a memoir of childhood stories and formative events, I'm sure it's all very wholesome, life-affirming stuff. And who doesn't like that? Chicken Soup for the Tea Party soul. Just in time for the holidays. How much did he pay to get that little display set up? I'm sure it's worth it. Like I said, he's a businessman. I'd trust his instincts.

What weird place. The "cafe" is full of people sitting alone on their computers. Every table is full. We sit for a moment around a "fireplace." I sit next to a throwback teenage girl; no phone no screens, just mindlessly flipping through US weeklies.

CA Conrad + Eileen Myles

2010-10-19T15:20:00.003-04:00

Another fine chapter to the public correspondence between Eileen Myles and CA Conrad, and essay by Conrad about Myles.

http://rattapallax.org/blog/2010/eileen-myles-clothed-in-nature-with-an-open-ear

Here's a glimpse into the essay, which I think speaks most succintly to what I love about both Conrad's and Myles' work, its combination of social defiance, cognitive transparency, and a non-academic, "vernacular" intelligence.

I woke from a terrible night on the floor next to friends after mixing too many intoxicants. Everyone else was still asleep, and we were in someone’s sister’s apartment and the sister was away. Poetry had already saved me before, but this time in my life, this time was particularly dark, you know, you’ve already been there yourself. But then I woke and my beautiful friends were still asleep on chairs, curled in corners, and this book poked from a pile of magazines. From the first poem WAKE UP! WAKE UP! the Eileen Myles alarm clock:
Big library where read Sappho.

Holes and all. Feel the wind

Shifting through. Aeolics.
Shiver when Sappho speaks of her
Heart Beat. It
Pounding down through the ages.

Old adrenaline, gives me a rush.
And morning sex was nice. In
morning light. Day blast-off.
Rusharound. Through the lightness.

That book that morning pulled me into my shoes, young and nauseous, not wanting to die. A couple of years later NOT ME came out and it took me a little while to realize that it was by the same author as the book from the party. WHO WAS THIS writing these poems? The state of queer, Queer, to be Queer came through the filter of her lines, her incredible insistence I AM HERE I AM GOING TO FUCKING PIN YOU TO A PASSING CLOUD IF YOU TRY TO REMOVE ME.

Kiss My Ass

2010-10-19T15:03:00.003-04:00

Mid-afternoon while working I’m driving my car little 97 Civic north along the river going to a client’s home somewhere up there, small house loaded with kids. I’m a social services caseworker I manage and mishandle endless stacks of paperwork meaning both pen on paper and all the computer stuff and then I go to people’s houses talk to people on the phone talk to so-and-so’s drug counselor or her mother or her probation officer or her lover or her kid’s teacher’s aide.

The house I’m going to now the dad works in a grain elevator filled with livestock feed. If you don’t know Buffalo is the King of the Grain Elevators, most are ‘dormant’ or already gone, a few still in use by a handful of legacy type jobs I would imagine, folks named McCarthy since 1882.

My car’s radio doesn’t work somehow I disconnected the cable one day with my big oafy legs so we keep recycling the same CDs I can’t listen to any more Tom Waits or any of Becky’s CD’s she’s always throwing them around in little piles they get all scratched up some songs will still work but mostly is a tease the song you want starts and then skips in that ugly digital hiccop. I have a CD book under the seat the kind of thing I used to be self conscious about letting anyone see from the window because it used to be the kind of thing people would break your window for. When I worked at a Pizzeria in the late 90s someone came in with such a book loaded with good CDs and I bought it off him for $10 and I still have at least the Miles Davis Filles de Kilimanjaro in my book and I still feel a little weird about having some person’s stuff, but the little weird is also a little sexy. It’s ok sometimes to get away with the money.

I'm taking the 990 ramp off the 290 it’s a good time to listen to an old CD and I find myself loving some of these old R.E.M. songs the first music I was really crazy for and I hear that line in “Sidewinder” about tell hear she can kiss my ass and laugh and say that she was only kidding and how I worried what my parents would do or think if they heard this word come off my favorite cassette tape because there was no swearing my house and whenever we watched a movie and people would swear my mom would utter a sharp ‘tsk’ in disgust just to let us all now the transgression had not gone unnoticed.

And Jeremiah Joyce, my neighbor Tom’s nephew who was just a tad younger than us but we all thought was really cool he looked like a 12 year old Oscar Wilde that’s what Tom and Tom’s other nephew Colin said at least, well let’s say somehow Jeremiah figured out that this ‘ass’ made me feel uneasy and I remember now driving onto the 990 for Lockport that he thought this was terribly amusing and I didn’t really understand why.

Our boy Rory

2010-09-09T13:47:00.003-04:00

Artvoice didn't publish my footnotes, which I'll publish here just for the hell of it. By way of foreward/postscript, I'll say that Rory Allen was soundly defeated in the primary.

It’s election season in Western New York. The footpath from mailbox to recycle box is a well rehearsed daily routine. The Incumbents, with their glossy mailings and t-shirt beclad supporters, are working the streets with a lethargy synonymous with the entire process. It’s hard to understand how important voting is. The big picture of our rampant systemic failure (RSF, which I qualify simply by pointing at the housing and schools in my neighborhood) becomes a simplified and debased death match: in one corner the Incumbents (BOO!!!) with their piles of big money labeled e pluribus status quo and their flashy red, white, and GREEN shorts with a name everyone recognizes; while in the other corner is the Challenger (YAY!!!). The Incumbent touts is record and promises more of the same. The Challenger plans to make changes he will never have the power to execute, points out the Incumbent is a politician,[1] which is apparently a dirty word, and advocates for himself as the true agent of change. His shorts aren’t flashy, and you’ve probably never heard his name, even if he’s your own councilman. But he’s selling something in short supply these days: faith in the democratic process these days in Gotham.

According to the ever folksy “Tea Party,”[2] a politician is not something you ever want to be, let alone a career politician![3] Their influence has spread far and wide.

Even in a primary race between democrats for New York State Assembly, to wit Sam Hoyt and Joe Golombek, both campaigns are trying to paint their opponent in red as the career politician. And you don’t use nasty words like that without looking for a fight. After all, as a candidate your first job is to convince people to actually go to the polls, and stirring some anger into the emotional pot is a solid strategy.

Buffalo Attorney/Developer Carl Paladino has won broad “Tea Party” support, no doubt partly thanks to the immediacy of his slogan: I’m mad as hell too Carl!” It doesn’t matter what they’re mad about, but for some reason it’s becoming politically expedient everywhere[4] in the free world to appeal to the emotional side of politics only. After the big “change,” the great “hope” floated to us two years ago in an advertising campaign the likes of which have never been seen, let alone imagined, the right is firing back with vitriol, diatribe, slander, oh my!

The scariest thing about using anger, which of course is very intimately intertwined with fear, isn’t that it can win an election outright now, but that it very soon could. People vote because they want to participate in the larger machinations of our ghostly government and many vote because they feel deep down that their candidate of choice is good. You make a gut call on who you like, based on often cursory, even superstitious reasoning.

I know because I play the game too. I enjoy voting because, if nothing else, it as at least a practice of high absurdity. I often know little or nothing about the candidates and I even try to follow local news closely. For local elections, the candidates are either made or flambéed in the primaries. The Republican Party often doesn’t even bother running a candidate, it’d be akin to burning money. You can often vote for the same candidate under multiple party lines (Democrat, Working Families, Conservative, Liberal, etc . . .), often conflating what you thought were pretty opposite ideological differences. And then the actual voting is a hoot. There’s that glorious crank that pulls the curtain closed behind you, giving you your own little democratic cocoon in which to exercise the ritual. There is the satisfaction of pressing down on a plastic lever that reveals a red arrow indicating the candidate’s name. I always feel let down after a crank the handle back to open the curtain. I’m mad when it’s all over, as if there was some real magic transpiring in that booth, as if the moment should actually feel more momentous. For these reasons, voting feels like a comical event. But it’s the joke you have to tell at the wake to excuse the tragedy of the corpse in the middle of the room. The joke you have to tell “to keep from going insane.”[5]

In 2008 I voted at 6 am in the morning down at Lafayette High School. It was an exciting day. I remember an older black woman down in line (there was a line to vote at 6 am!) and she was beaming and although she didn’t say it, it seemed like she hadn’t slept, she couldn’t wait to get to vote! That night in Chicago was also a very touching image, the country seemed more united than I ever remember it. I think it’s true that people want to be a part of something bigger than what they are, or what they can see. Most people I talk to, and I talk to my share, express a desire to improve their life in some way. I still hold on to that day, hold on to the innocence that pervaded my world in voting for Barack Obama and watching the country on TV greet him. It was as if we all suspended our deep cynicism for politics and the leadership of our murderous society, hoping that we were collectively improving the lives of not just ourselves, but really of everyone.

Does it feel weird to anyone else to recall the optimism of that day? Does anyone really now believe that Obama isn’t playing on the teeter-totter of public opinion, sticking to a center-right position (in the European schema, that is) that is focused purely on the further consolidation of his power? Hope. Change. Can these words mean anything now in political discourse? Will we really allow another campaigner to blow this kind of sunshine out our netherparts?

This is the really scary part within the present political marketing of anger/fear as the motivating emotion for political involvement. The alternative has been cheapened, bastardized. This is all we’ve got. Perhaps the so-called “economic downturn” is to blame for people’s pessimism, but I’m not buying it, at least not on these terms. It’s hard to blame Carl for exposing the anger market, after all, he’s a businessman and he knows a good market when he sees one. A good and decent American.[6] The real beef, the elephant in the room, is our RSF and running a campaign that calls this out would be akin to raising the white flag, and open one to criticism of being unpatriotic.

Enter my neighbor Rory, a democratic challenger running for State Senate. He owns a printing business. Judging by the contents of my recycling, sounds like a good business to be in when launching a political career. I didn’t know he was my neighbor until he walked up my driveway and announced who he was, where he lived, and what he was up to. “You might have seen me driving around my golf cart?” I hadn’t, but I took him at his word. He told me he was running against Antoine Thompson, a well-funded but obviously vulnerable candidate.[7] A good businessman knows how to find his market. I also hadn’t realized at the time that I know Rory, in a very Buffalo kind of way. He’s married to the cousin of niece of a good and old friend of mine. He seems like an honest person, someone committed to our city, and I suppose that’s all we need to have to go on. The political observer/willing absurdist in me can give him only this rather superficial endorsement.

Maybe some folks can do better in building their personal endorsements, but I can’t be the only one who makes up their mind in a similar fashion. While it’s trite to use a phrase like “political disillusionment,” there’s an obvious ill that nothing short of rewriting the constitution AND revisiting the wisdom of market capitalism can cure. And voters aren’t the only ones feeling the blues, political activism itself on both sides has become an empty rehearsal of with one part anger, one part fear, a dash of academic elitism, a helping of hate-politics. Community organizations working on the micro level seem to be the exception. In Buffalo we should be proud of the work done by PUSH, Buffalo ReUse, our neighborhood community centers (Old First Ward, Father Belle, Hispanics United, to name a few), and so many other people and agencies which keep the gum plugged into the holes of failing dam. It’s hard to be an activist these days, everyone hates the war, but are we wrong to think the federal government doesn’t care who and what it exploits in the pursuit of its interests? Or that our elected folk and two-party system don’t give us a chance to care?

A Challenger to an Incumbent for state senate in this day has to have the charisma to convince people, all 30% of the registered voters or whatever it will amount too this year, that they have an answer within the force of their personality. Down on Baynes Street. our boy Rory is hawking hope for a change, one that no one can truthfully imagine.

[1] Incumbent Sam Hoyt has taken full advantage of this in his challenge from Joe Golombek, a city Councilman. Apparently pleased he can accuse Golombek thus, has adopted the campaign slogan Democrats can’t Trust Politician Joe Golombek.

[2] And I respect that like in all great Western endeavors, there are multiple factions and values represented under the Tea Party moniker.

[3] Even to me when I read these two words together, I recall negative political advertising on television in which the words are announced with grand disgust. You could probably substitute sexual predator and 30% of viewers wouldn’t stir.

[4] Far-right parties in Europe have long garnered pretty consistent support, usually in correlation to high unemployment rates, of 5% to as much as 30% of the popular vote. These parties espouse a scary kind of nationalism, historically impossible in the US, but apparently now in vogue. Rest assured these parties have shoddy ADL profiles.

[5] It’s telling that the most persuasive argument for voting is logically a negative one: that you should vote to keep another person’s vote from counting twice, preferably someone whose worldview you must of course be diametrically opposed to.

[6] Full disclosure: The best job of my teen years was working in a parking lot owned by Ellicott Development, Mr. Paladino’s business nom de guerre. We parked cars for Buffalo Bisons games, and it paid $7/hour (minimum wage was under $5). I got the impression then, and I still maintain it, that Mr. Paladino treats his charges well.

[7] Being not only an Incumbent, a career politician, but also the object of much scrutiny in the local press, AV included, for taking an ill-advised vacation to Jamaica and not being very forthcoming about how it was paid for and under what auspices he was traveling.

Speidi, Most Famous

2010-08-21T10:29:00.001-04:00

I chose fame

some ploy
for attention
his split from wife Heidi
the fact that nobody has seen divorce papers
castmates are skeptical,
is the real deal.

"We love each other
but I'm a famewhore
I'll never grow out of it

"[Heidi] knows that and doesn't want that."

"I want every kind of press," he says
"She believes in bad press.“
There's no way
my love for fame
her love for puppies
will work successfully
She just wants to be calmer."

"doesn't want to be Speidi anymore
She wants to be Heidi the sex symbol."

"She thought I'd burn out
but no, I'm still the same
to be famous
"I need to do stunts
and take cues from Brad Pitt

Speidi trouble nothing new.
"It's been a constant
"She would be like, 'Are you really Tweeting that?
Are you really doing that?'"

limelight-loving reality
Pratt says he decided to grow a beard and turn to art.
"I've already gone for the blonde look.
Now I'm the Hollywood look."
"I'm an artist now.
I have an easel and everything.

From T.O.

2010-08-21T00:10:00.000-04:00

Dear Nation

2011 is now
a big orange circle
my career excited
the opportunity
in pursuit
the championship

thankful to Mike
for giving me
opportunity

in life nothing is guaranteed
but the Super Bowl
total effort.

stronger than you've ever seen it
Life bumps along
makes you stronger
"me against the world"
life can be more

support my grandmother and the love my friends,
lost faith, confidence
keeps me strong and focused on more than just T.O.

now my extended family
look forward to
the Midwest
confident in chances
anything less
will definitely take a fight gut
season

I signed here
for reason

with power and respect
Texas
look at my calendar
Jungle !

Yours,

Batman

Eating Fish from the Detroit River

2010-06-05T22:41:00.000-04:00

*

There's that man he goes around singing old songs he tries to get attention of everybody really he's not too well but a survivor of the mental health system and still he looks healthy he walks a lot and when you walk a lot you get healthy and you don't get bored of walking the same street up and down up and down on every good walking day and now it's Saturday as he approaches groups of kids in the parkway and sings Saturday! In the park! Think it was the Fourth of July!

*
You are not supposed to catch catfish out of the Detroit River and eat them but other fish you should be okay so here's a quick and easy guide to your American River your international boundary body of water your Canadian River your Can-Am relationship river KEEP YOUR HEAD UP AND SPEAK WITH THE ATTENDANT in a considerate manner you're on camera somewhere what time is it? 22:31 EST lie down on the floor decompress filet a rock bass everything will be great

*
There's a small city with a small hockey team and there are no jobs there but there is a proud local tradition of setting houses on fire houses where no one lives because when we're done we need to have a dumpster put the house in the dumpster but the dumpster company is international and they don't call them dumpsters they call themselves managers and they manage the resources of waste and they don't make dumpster-sized houses and besides if they did the people's hands are just not big enough to pick up a house and throw it in a dumpster

*
Armando Galarraga

Perfection x 2

2010-05-30T11:23:00.001-04:00

Roy Halladay.

Thank you Roy. It's been terrific watching you pitch all these years, and now you've locked it in. You were perfect. For two hours and thirteen minutes, you were immortal. Carlos Ruiz, you get second place here. You're winning me over with that smile, with your nickname Chooch, and with Halladay saying from the 6th inning on he was locked on your calls. They must have been great calls Chooch, perfect.

Many, I'm sure, are not surprised that it was you. A lot of this reaction I'm sure is based on Dallas Braden's improbable and miraculous perfect game earlier this month. If you had to pick a guy in the majors who could pitch a perfect game, Doc Halladay might be high on that list. But I think it's ridiculous to even dream of such a list. Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux, Bob Gibson. None of them threw perfect games. There's more anomaly than reason, more wonder than logic. And this is a huge part of baseball's charm, a sport governed by an ever-increasing array of statistics. John Sterling, the radio voice of the Yankees, returns to his pet-theme ad nauseam, that the game of baseball is in its roots wild: unpredictable, ungovernable, and runs counter to reason. Of course, the voice of the Yankees would have to take such a stance after watching his team spend more money than God for years to field a team that couldn't win big games (until last year).

Roy Halladay has been an elite pitcher for a long time, yet his typical stat line looks a lot like the Marlins' Josh Johnson's from yesterday's game: 7IP, 7H, 1R, 6K, 1BB. Roy Halladay can strike batters out, he can beat them with his speed and placement, but he is a contact hitter. He gives up base hits, lots of them. But he stays out of trouble and wins games because he doesn't walk batters, and he doesn't give up a lot of big hits. He doesn't get rattled pitching from the stretch. He's been a pro the whole way. So although he came within an out of a no-hitter on his second major league start in 1998, he's really not that kind of a pitcher. But perfect games are special, and Doc Halladay is by all means a special player.

Born in Colorado, drafted by Toronto and groomed into a perennial all-star there, he was unlike a lot of sports stars on a Toronto team that's not the Maple Leafs, complaining of their high taxes and relative irrelevance in a hockey city. He wanted to stay in Toronto his entire career and be a part of a winner.

When you pitch a perfect game, you deserve some nice things to be said about you by complete strangers. I'm happy for you Roy.

Perfection

2010-05-09T20:46:00.003-04:00

I'm proud to say that a selection of recent longer works, mostly narrative poems, a talk, a story, and things between, have been published online over at BlazeVox, as part of the new issue's Buffalo Focus. I'll put the link to feature in the right column. The last poem of the group is its shortest:

Messiah Blues

Some think Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time.

The purists have doubts, say check with Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell first

Other think it's Lebron James, or Kobe Bryant

Lebron James is younger and he's friends with Jay-Z

Kobe is a winner but he is scandalized

I think you're all wrong

the greatest basketball player ever

has never played the game

the greatest basketball player

will be easy to pick out

when he comes

he's the one who won't ever miss a shot

Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics pitched a perfect game today, on mother's day. It's very sweet, if not melodramatic (my own cynicism recognized), that his own mother died when he was in high school and his grandmother was one of 12.000 or so at the game to witness it. A classmate of mine, James Z, lost his mother when we were freshman in high school. I know him from the football team and I knew he was sweet, super nice, innocent like me, lived on the same street as me though we never had met previously. I got to spend some time with him when he came back to school after his mom died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. He was living with an uncle and was heavily mourning his mom's death, though he carried himself with pride and grace. He finished high school despite a plethora of strange health problems and we actually met up again in college at UB. We'd get together a few mornings a week, myself, James, Drew R, and Ben H, and just chat and laugh and make fun of each other. It's one of the crucial survival skills you form at an all-boys high school. I lost track of him since then. I ran into a mutual classmate about a year ago and heard the awful news he had died, of a heart-attack. He wasn't ever able to get his health right again, physically or mentally, since his mom died.

Perfect games have fascinated me for years for their ephemeral singularity, its ability to put time in a bottle and call that time 'perfect,' that the pitcher's concentration and execution was perfect, almost supernatural. The one Dallas Braden and the Oakland defense finished today was only the 19th in major league history. Dallas Braden is not great pitcher, his lifetime ERA is over 4 and he was drafted in the 24th round. The Tampa Bay Rays are an excellent team with the best lineup in the American league not in pinstripes. This should not have happened. But I'm excited that it did. He was perfect, no mistakes, unhittable, wrapped in concentration, in magic, in luck. Watching the team react to the final out like they won the World Series is truly touching. Here's to you Dallas, James, and mothers of the universe!

The Out-Crowd

2010-04-15T11:09:00.000-04:00

It's not at all a fresh idea to say there's a problem with the politics of poetry. I always feel somewhat grateful, that at least were not Canada, where there's annual grants for book projects to be published in great quantity, and people have all but fought each other on the patios of Toronto bars. But we're equally vicious and ego-driven of a community as they, I'm assured. Part of the problem is the competition, the saturation of mediocre poetry. Another part of the problem is, as I understand, that the great majority of these publicly-funded poetry books in Canada are pulped after not selling well. There's no money to be had.

Mark Nowak was in Buffalo a few weeks ago and read from his Coal Mountain Elementary project at Hallwalls, but I don't know if the verb 'read' is good enough anymore, particularly in this instance. Nowak didn't really read poems as much as give a PowerPoint presentation about his project with an excerpt of poetic text thrown in here and there. He paid special attention to the text found on signage around coal mines he had pictures of, and gave 'close readings' of these. He talked about how he incorporated 6000 plus pages of news articles and government texts dealing with coal mining tragedies, as well as 'on-the-ground' interviews and information from the coal-mining communities of West Virginia. He talked about how every tragedy, the same thing would happen: the national media would roll into some tiny town with their trucks, vans, and helicopters for two days and then roll back out while politicians would promise to get tough about safety regulations, and the owners of the mine would express their deep regret and remorse. Nowak talked about the even worse conditions in China, where he collaborates with photographer Ian Teh to nobly document the human cost of unfettered global capitalism. It's very topical, of course, at the current moment. The week Mark was here there were 200 miners trapped underground in China. A week after he left the worst mining 'accident' in almost 30 years occurred in West Virginia. Reading online that the Governor of WVA was asking all miners to return to work on Friday (tomorrow) is enough, to borrow Isaac Bashevis Singer's phrase, to make one's eyes go black, as there's no way any governing body has had time to implement and enforce tougher safety regs. (There's a vital link here to Mark's Buffalo roots and the photography of the immortal Milton Rogovin.)

There was a Q an A after the reading, another reason why this was an event mis-billed as a poetry reading, and I asked Mark about the use of poetry as a medium for this particular project because it struck me as more of a public awareness campaign than as art. The use of poetry of medium for documentary art was new and surprising to me. Mark's response to the question was equally surprising, that while he didn't really answer why he chooses poetry for the project, he said that he hates writing and that when he hatches a project he's almost tormented by it to complete it, and he also said he doesn't care if what he writes is poetry or not, basically that poetry world is off his map (Howard Zinn blurbs Coal Mountain Elementary. He explained he found the poetry world to be toxic, that when he would give a reading at the Poetry Project, for example, he know in advance which poets would show up because they were friends, and which ones wouldn't because they were enemies, and that his potential readership was too narrow.

In the weeks since, I've read two entertaining and familiar works on the toxicity of the poetry world: Daniel Nester's and Jim Behrle's. I am more than a little reminded of my life 7-10 years ago, where I with my friends plotted how we could be the next beats, the next New American poets, the next Black Mountain group, and how now more than a few of this group have also said goodbye to poetry with more likely to come. It's also distressing to come to terms with the all-too-true facets of the 'in crowd' of poetry, and how the squeakiest most mediocre mice get the grease, and how almost all of it is mediocre, without greater purpose, read and shared only among poets as an inside joke that no one remembers enough of to pass on to others in a bar.

I'm not throwing the towel in yet, but I do feel challenged to write poems and works to engage those outside of the audience of poets, but that thinks of poets first.

"Biomedical Corridor"

2010-04-10T16:41:00.001-04:00

I was in a sporting goods store today that was selling New Era UB hats. They looked kind of awkward sitting there next to hats for real teams. Not that UB doesn't have a team, but that I still can't associate the logo and name with any kind of sports team. It's never been a sports school, but now I guess it's trying. But it still doesn't work. The logo just looks so corporate. Is this a sports team, a university, a pharmaceutical distributor?

I suppose the alma mater has bigger fish to fry. It's finally worked out an agreement to purchase the McCarley Garden apartments, a successful (one of the few) housing project on the north edge of downtown Buffalo that sits on 15 acres of coveted land as Hospitaland adjacent to it keeps growing. Geoff Kelly, who deals some great local dope weekly in Artvoice's week in review, took this opportunity to point out how freaking rich and powerful UB has become. I look at the list of people on the UB Foundation and I'm not at all surprised that the closest any of them have come a humanities background is law school. The gig is up.

The first person I thought of while reading this article was Mike Basinski. Some friends had mockingly called me the mayor of Buffalo, but Mike Basinski is and always will be the mayor. I don't know much of the inner workings and politics that Poetry Library at UB and its noble interlocuters, Basinski and Jim Maynard, face, but I always get the impression that half of their job is spent in the defense of the merits of the library against bean counters with six (and apparently seven) figure salaries who have been highly trained in the language of theoretical higher education administration. They're basically business types, suits, talking about competition in the market place. I mean that logo looks like that for a reason!

And here's a plug for the poetry library at UB, with the largest collection of Joyce manuscripts outside of London and perhaps the most comprehensive collection of 20th century poetry in North America, send your books and magazines and everything you make to Mike Basinski. As long as it's still there, and Mike and Jim are on staff, keep sending it in.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

2010-04-08T23:18:00.000-04:00

I change my mind, somewhat, about using the white Statler Tower boards as a public art project. Mainly because the term 'public art' itself is problematic in that it sounds so organized and official. Not what the Statler needs. I think the City of Buffalo agrees, having placed a "security" (another tired word) fence around the perimeter of the entire building, adding insult to injury after another cornice piece fell four stories onto the ground (of course no one was there). The fence makes a spontaneous and fun art action all the more interesting.

I've been away from the mounds for a little while, I'm all clogged up. I really came here to say a few things about the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which I've only recently discovered. He's a big deal. I found him at the Buffalo Central Library, which has like ten of his albums. So he must be a pretty big deal. The one I found today was produced by the shoeless bearded big-time producer Rick Rubin of American Recordings. Rick Rubin's production of Johnny Cash, for example, was really stark, stripped down, more intimate and emotional. I admit I don't have a great ear for music production, but Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sounds just as good on other recordings, including live recordings. A big part of this is the simplicity of the music which always consists of Khan's lead vocals, that really give new meaning to lead vocals, supported by a secondary singer and then a choir of four or five more male singers, who are almost always clapping their hands. There's a hand drummer playing tabla and a harmonium.

Khan doesn't need Rubin to give him an emotional sound, he's always emotional, I mean look at that picture! And of course it's beautiful and spiritual and all that too, he's right of out the Sufi tradition with the exception that I don't think he's ever focused on romantic love but on spiritual love. But for an American listener like myself, secular yet fascinated by spiritual love and mysticism and also infatuated with any recording with hand claps, it's totally captivating music. The repetition of the melody and refrain are hypnotic yet energetic, like red bull with vodka. I get the sensation that I burn calories just listening to it.

Buffalo's Blank Slate

2010-03-24T22:59:00.000-04:00

The Statler Towers, or Statler Hotel, frames a striking image in downtown Buffalo now that is mothballed. It sits on the central plaza as designed by Joseph Ellicott, a circle, across from City Hall and a $90 million federal courthouse currently under construction and designed by artist Robert Mangold. It is an E-shaped building, once the finest large hotel and ballroom in Buffalo. My uncle bought a dresser that was in one of the hotel rooms at an auction years ago (it hasn't been a hotel for a while), and because Elvis stayed at the Statler during his time in Buffalo, the dresser has been known to my family as Elvis's dresser. Elvis's dresser is currently at our house. My personal piece of the Statler.

The Statler was also the site of the local reemergence of the peregrine falcon, a pair of which began nesting on the top, in the last circular window structure to the left. The peregrine falcon, it seems, has recently figured how to find a home in rampant human expansion.

Since being closed off entirely it's taken on a new presence. The long stretches of windows facing Niagara Square are boarded up and the boards have been painted white. It's a public art project in the making. The backside of the building, on Mohawk St. where it feels the sun never shines, as it runs on the north side of the building, completely shadowed, feels pretty haunted. The garbage there, some of it snow melt garbage, is something of an anomaly, but strangely sublime. I found a decomposing pigeon wing back there, most likely a victim of the falcons. Here's my pictures of it as I walked around it, clockwise of course (I was tempted to walk around it 7 times to see if it would fall, but I like the building ultimately, and want it to succeed).

Style in Nature

2010-03-18T16:33:00.002-04:00

Staying home from work, being domestic, going through old things, and I found this on my phone, a picture I took less than a year ago at Tifft Nature Preserve, said to be the largest nature preserve within a city's borders. I don't want to add too much to this statement, but instead place it within the discourse of the state of American urban education as exhibit A. Let me just say that in behind this blind (North Viewing Blind) regularly yields a great collection of migratory water fowl. This is best part of Tifft to see them. It's my lucky spot.

Day Blends into TV

2010-03-08T22:28:00.000-05:00

you can't track the days
put a mark on Friday in august
it's already here

everyday
is not everyday
when you're a baby

you make me forget everything
and when you're gone
I tend to forget you

say hi
to house sparrow
nudge them awake at dawn

a guy shoots a federal agent
outside a bank

mercy flight helicopter
bleeding man dying

David Arquette is cute

Firefighters stuck in a tunnel
one guy passes out
a girl has a panic attack

2010-03-06T22:49:00.000-05:00

Who else?
don't make promises
on bedtime
everynight
lights low
but never off
let the wall intuit
the rest

breakfast
at the right time
won't miss it
when it decides to speak

Erie County Blues

2010-03-04T22:57:00.000-05:00

I've had a strange opportunity to give a close reading to the poems of a number of Native American poets and I've come to find out what I already knew, (but in a new way): that Simon Ortiz is one hell of a writer. Comparing him to the other poets I've been reading on this adventure (and I'm sure this is true of his non-Native contemporaries as well), he's a head above most.

Simon Ortiz visited Charles Bernstein's undergrad class I was taking seven or eight years ago, and I remember being drawn to it, not being able to dismiss it, even though at first glance that was probably my inclination. He read from his book From Sand Creek, which if I remember was a kind of psychic exploration of the Sand Creek Massacre, popularized by Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Formally speaking, his poetry is conventional, lyric. And while I've never tired of the lyric form, it's often a kind of dumping ground for boring and contrived poetry. Not so here. There's almost always something to get at with Ortiz.

Here's a quick example. I mean the title alone is kind of off-putting, but by the end of the poem, I'm right there.

Culture and Universe

Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love,
existence.
We are measured
by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.

I don’t know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.

With painted wooden sticks
and feather, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.

We stop.
Lean into me.
The universe
sings in quiet meditation.

We are wordless:
I am in you.

Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.
And the stone wall
I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.

It’s not humankind after all
nor its culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we do not enter.
It is the stars
we do not let own us.

I feel the poem does represent something universal to human experience, something immediate, but I also can't escape the sense of wanting to be more on the inside of the Native heritage. I think there's something to this, and not just because mass culture (see James Cameron's Avatar) has planted this in my brain. I want to belong to something that's both within my identity and much larger than it simultaneously. The League of Poets, perhaps. What underlies this is a crisis of American identity. The majority of Americans are cut off from their roots, either by atrocity of slavery and colonialism, or by assimilation. (I've read the largest ethnicity in the US is German, some 20% of Americans have German heritage, but there's a dearth of German-themed restaurants and civic events that adorn the Irish, Italian, Polish, Puerto Rican, African-Americans, etc.)

I hope for regional identities be strengthened and for further regionalism to emerge over time in America, but this is most likely some form of nostalgic period envy.

I wanted to somehow tie the Erie County Holding Center into this, because it's been in my mind all day. I'll just do it here, however sloppily. Three suicides in four months in substandard conditions in a corrupt and embarrassing facility. All three were in heroin withdrawal. Regional pride and identity suffers here, suffers everywhere.

Fish Sandwich

2010-02-26T16:03:00.001-05:00

photos from Linh Dinh

Where I work I get an hour lunch, and I always take it. Today I had a few little things to do so I was walking around in and out of buildings trying to decide what to eat. At one place I see a daily special for Lent - Fish Sandwich. Big piece of fried battered haddock on a white roll with tartar sauce. That's what I wanted. I walk to the downtown mall. A dead place with mostly closed up stores but with a large food court catering to the lunch crowd. The only reason most people ever enter the building. Linh Dinh, being the kind of traveler and photographer he is, found this place immediately after getting off the bus on a recent visit (for a BIG NIGHT reading). He ordered a Beef-on-Weck, they didn't give him horseradish. I want a fish sandwich. I ask for one. The girl asks "crunchy or haddock," pointing to an example of the crunchy fish, a burnt, obviously processed patty of generic fish. I get the haddock with some pickles and cole slaw and tartar sauce a few tomatoes.

I'm not Catholic. I'm just a native Western-New Yorker and eating fried fish on Friday is second nature. It must feel good to be religious, maybe. This has to be the best part, the ritual of it: that the expected will in fact come to pass. The best part of Judaism has to be the weekly holiday of Shabbat. So this is part of a religious ritual, eating a fish sandwich in a dead mall with the snow blowing outside, because Western New York is dominantly Catholic and for some reason Catholics don't eat meat on Fridays during lent. I wonder how much religion plays into local identity, and how localized identity must lie to some degree at the root of all religions. For example, our former mayor (Irish Catholic) Griffin famously once advised his citizens during a snowstorm to just 'get a six pack and stay home.' I wonder if in a few hundred years there might be a group of native Western New Yorkers on Mars who feel an inexplicable compulsion to get soused when there's a meteor shower.

I look up into the mall and feel a nostalgic melancholy coming in afterwaves from the fish sandwich. I think I see my old friend Eric G., but it's not him and I wish he was in Buffalo, working some job, maybe where Damian works. Damian is doing pretty good in his job. Then I see Kevin T., but it's someone else because he's somewhere else.

I got and get a latte and consider how this latte would rank according to Michael K.'s rating system. He lives here, but I know he's also haunted by the ghosts of living friends.

Hoa Nguyen - Hecate Lochia - Big Night this Saturday

2010-02-22T22:45:00.000-05:00

     I met Hoa Nguyen in November of this past year in Tulsa, OK. Of all charming places to meet anyone. I gave her my chapbook, she gave me this perfect-bound one from Hot Whiskey Press. There's a hierarchy of books, perhaps, where chapbooks are handmade and sold for under $10 and 'real' books are made by machines and sold over the internet for $15-20. Hoa didn't care about that and that's the first thing I want to say about her as a writer.
     I don't know what Hecate Lochia is. I do know that I jumped right into it and identified immediately with it's various attentions: body, ecology, parenting. I know the parenting is weird tag to throw on there, being a parent isn't a central part of American poetic discourse, but it is a central component to Hoa's book. I find this to be a brilliant shift in attention, it's about time poets wrote about being parents and more specifically in Hecate Lochia: themes of pregnancy pregnant, birthing, living with babies and children, cooking, and gardening are scattered throughout and treated with a salient matter-of-factness. This blends seamlessly with her attentions towards ecology and femininity, making a really powerful gesture about both. Statements of overt feminism are rather rare in the book, the woman is integral and even in the nature things. A possible exception is the terrific ending of "You Say the Land,"

And I do think it's true that men stole
the magical instruments of women

& we were too busy
with ordinary life
to worry about this

The poems are mostly the size of a page or smaller, left-justified with frequent floating, and words and phrases often being placed mysteriously in quotations. Poems that start one way twist and turn organically, usually ending somewhere else. To this end, the poems feel both natural in their growth line by line, yet the presence of the internet is never far away.

I could click the Earth
with my finger spin

A great example of what poetics of this book is trying to accomplish is found in the poem "Horse Herb," which is a plant (weed) native to Hoa's Texas landscape, so the internet tells me. Refreshingly, ecology is never pastoral in this book, but another fact of an aware life (the brown-headed cowbird is a complete anomaly in the bird world, she lays her eggs in other birds' nest and lets those birds unwittingly raise their young),

Horse herb legs around
   and a fungus
rots the remains of elm root

Our native meadow "lost
to the plow"        You devour
habitat are the brown-
headed cow bird

Heather wants bracted-twisted flowers
wants me to twist T shits
and dip them into dye

                    Instead
I smear the stove with avocado

Now Lady Elms arrives
in the kitchen              long blonde hair
lean body leaves
She shows me a profile and a letter

Everyone is a sexual being



   The last thing I want to say is that she's reading this Saturday night in Buffalo at the Western New York Book Arts Center, Buffalo Poets Theatre will be performing Jack Spicer's Troilus & Cressida, and the native post-industrial trio Gut Flora will be making music.

Winter Olympics

2010-02-22T19:44:00.000-05:00

I've been keeping an eye on these Olympics via our local NBC affiliate and I've noticed a pretty annoying trend of the creating mini-Lifetime movies about the athlete's lives, invariably their personal tragedies. I like sports, I like the Olympics, the competitions are enough for me. Watching Lindsey Vonn reacting to winning gold is enough for someone like me. Pondering the obsession that must go along with the pursuit of Olympic cred is enough for me. I like the short stories of Stefan Zweig, so I'm interested in obsession in all its forms. But these particular, niche obsessions is compelling. I mean who realizes in adolescence that their dream is to be a short-track speed skater? A four-man bobsledder? A biathlete? Maniacal parents, or I should say parent.
Three of these life stories I've seen on NBC's coverage (the only three I noticed paying attention to) have followed a similar arc: Mom dies in early childhood, father and child stick together and form bond over sport. I imagine these fathers to be harsh and exacting, traumatized by the death of their partner/wife, and thus driven by fear into an obsession with the perfection of a sport they vicariously dream in through their gifted children. I might be reaching here, but not too much. Parents can be brutal with their children's gifts, for some reason especially in the realm of sports.

Last night NBC decided to put an event called ice dancing into their prime time slot instead of the USA-Canada hockey game. Maybe I should stop right there. Somehow I watched a bit of ice dancing which kind of resembles a fast-paced and synchronized ballroom dancing on ice. The dancers are costumed according to some ridiculous and simplistic theme. The American pair were cowboys, flannel shits and jeans, dancing to Johnny Cash. The French woman was French maid, the man wore a beret. It's a completely vapid mask put over an equally vapid premise for a competition. The Russian pair, however, took my breath away, really. I have not laughed that hard in a long, long time. I laughed so loud and long it hurt. I couldn't get out of my mind that it all looked like a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Moments where the absurdity, futility, and ignorance of human nature are this expertly put together (and in performance on national TV no less) are extremely rare. The picture says a lot, but the video says a lot more, and please notice when he pulls her around by the pony tail. They claimed to be doing an "Aboriginal" dance. What a horrifying moment for native cultures all over the globe, especially those in British Columbia and Australia, to see the generic native so unintentionally mocked.

Becky Moda-Lowinger at Rust Belt Books

2010-02-20T23:08:00.000-05:00

Becky's show at Rust Belt Books on Allen St. in Buffalo is an intimate gathering of obsessive projects made by simple operations and displayed without much, if any fanfare. They're there until the end of February, so hurry up if you're in Buffalo. But chances are most of us will miss it, these things don't last long - like the flowering of cherry blossoms.

The pieces are varied in media and scope. A few of them could be called large, but even those are made up of smaller pieces patched together. The work is predominantly small, made from papers and materials that originally fit quite easily in the palm of the hand.

For me, the centerpiece of the show are the small drawings done with white pencil on black paper. They are quick, skeletal studies with sparse images. Quixotic and mysterious, these to me tell little stories, fragments of fairy tales. I like how they appear quickly crafted and drawn, making the moment of their creation more tangible. The focus of these drawings are often animals. Dumb, fat, cute animals. They remind me a little of Gary Larson's Far Side comics.

The show was put together during Becky's pregnancy with our son Isaac. Much of the work predates her pregnancy, but some of it ain't. A lot of it done with one hand, one side of the brain, while the rest of the mind and body were off doing something else. Better that way. The pieces are naked of self-consciousness and mostly instinctual: lines, light use of color, reliance on the handmade and immediate.

Michael Slosek - The Sequel

2010-02-19T15:17:00.003-05:00

I got this book in the mail alongside the two other new House Press chapbooks, Eric Unger's Bastion and Luke Daly's Vats, which I also hope to review here soon.

Michael's book is named curiously, like a rap album (due props to Eric G). His previous book was titled "A Sequence for Cinematic History" which I know I read but I have no memory of reading. At times this work borders on unreadable in the classic sense. By this I'm referring to the expectation of reading which includes a beginning point, and endpoint, and places along the way for rests, markings, changes of landscape and texture that serve as mnemonic place markers. So thinking of this book as the sequel to something is really kind of funny and not without a cache satire pointed towards mass culture. Some level of social commentary has to be present for these poems to work successfully, and it is. These days I find it hard to read anything without the prerequisite leitmotif of the Fall of America. Thankfully, Mr. Slosek's poems, if taken seriously (and I would argue they should be) represent a society in disjointed fragments, a rubble of emotion and narrative.

It took me quite a few one-hour lunch breaks to get through this small yet suprisingly dense book. Most of the time I felt too lazy to read it during lunch, but when I did I found a lot of what excites me about the maze of language, it's what brought me to poetry in the first place. It's an intoxicating experience lazily summed up as getting your mind blown.

What I consider the book's central poem is also the book's longest, "A Scene of Cheerful Transport." It was while reading this poem that I finally started to piece together some of what Slosek is driving at in this work. He's taking apart what are treated as movie scenes and narratives (I don't know if they're real or imaginary, and doubt it matters), splicing them, fragmenting them.

They shot this inside a room of glass, anticipating
the exit, and the cropping out. The way the first
scene fades to black, then to the mouth,
the screams, the clamor that radiates
from the screen, in the suit you've worn
since the first film in the trilogy.
. . .

AND SOME MORE:

Then there are gates, the photo
albums, and they keys that fit into walls.
A movie called The Moth Huntersm
or The Musician's Mother. Both describe
a story using note cards
about death and dying and the importance of love,
set in a sea coast city.

Here are some words from my dictionary:
hump: bosse, hurt: blesse, illiterate:
analphabet. In this case the sun
is a symbol of wounding
because it is setting and rising again
like maritime hours.

Even now, typing these lines, I'm really drawn into the mystery of them, the scenes they imagine, the syntax that strictly orders the poems, and the total lack of semantic cohesion. A film stripped of images and undone of purpose.

A fine, deeply secretive book.

The City Real

2010-02-19T12:09:00.003-05:00

Ordered the new book by Frank Sherlock & CAConrad off SPD and a few days later it came in a big box. I was kinda surprised and anagered at the size and amount of packaging they sent me, and the irony of filling the box with those edible, 'biodegradable' packing peanuts.

Having spent some engaging and memorable hours with Frank and Conrad, I think that their relationship as poets and friends has to be one of the most vital and fertile I've seen personally. I mean here to review their book, but the ease and trust that a collaboration depends upon is obviously built directly out of their friendship. They know each other's moves and quirks and move effortlessly around each other, like Henrik and Daniel Sedin, around their city, as the epigraph invokes:

Phil-a-del-phia, noun or imaginary noun1.Geographic location. 2. Brotherly love. 3. Geographic location of otherly love. 4. The real and imagined.

Sometimes in the book, you're told who is at the helm with a ME designated to Conrad and a Sherlock for Frank. Other times, you're left to guess whose shoulder you're looking over. I guess that Conrad says stuff like:

if I could
part my
flesh write
one word
on bone:
EMBARK!

and Frank, in direct Philly narrative:

A bright orange Cease Operations
sticker advises to go away. L & I
closed down the old man tavern for
liquor violations. To keep up w/ the
times, it became an after-hours spot.
A private club w/ one member. To
get in you had to be a friend of Kevin-
who is definitely not a friend of Bill.

One of the easiest things to like about this book is it's immersion into the immediate, a universal gesture which I think, ironically, would be less possible in New York City than in Buffalo, Toledo, Cincinnati. Conrad and Sherlock make no mistake of being 'of' Philadelphia:

I am here to be new to

the city that birthed me & new to

this case that has carried me through

and don't waste their time pining for a more glamorous locale, a polis. At least not in this book, here the city is REAL

WE CHEAT EVERYBODY
AND PASS THE SAVINGS
ON TO YOU!"
--sign in window at
Via Bicylce Shop

and maybe my favorite snip of text in the book:

each Philadelphian
makes these streets
by seeing them
with our lives

"The City Imagined" then takes on the fringes of the possible, not so much by foolishly imagining an ideal society but by representing the unseen machinations of the city as mega-organism. The unseen is the mystery no one is trying to solve, not even with Google Earth mapping every corner, or the Police department attempting to have a live feed of streets under the mistake guise of safety.

Sometimes the real the imagined live together, maybe all the time for the lucky ones.

I am just walking
along this street and
this happens to be
the perfect spot for
my DREAM BIG billboard:

IMPREGNATE YOUR
ELVIS OF DESIRE
TODAY!

One final word, I really appreciate how both Conrad and Sherlock make their books. They (& Conrad may be becoming a master at this) are really creating a new kind of book of poetry, one that flows almost effortlessly from cover to cover, seemingly without discrete poems, but a poetic quasi-narrative that builds upon itself. When I look back in one of these books I'm surprised to find there are no pictures in them. Among the new work being done by good American poets, these two have the best chances at appealing to newer and young audiences.

New Turn

2010-02-19T11:17:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking for a while to get this blog going more actively again, and in a slightly different direction. I still plan on posting poems and weird bits of ephemera, but I'd also like to include more of the 'daily news,' that is, reviews of things I'm reading, cultural criticism, and sundry pieces of stories.

I'm convinced the
distance some people
travel away from themselves
can be measured by the
size of their
televisions
-CAConrad & Frank Sherlock (City Real & Imagined)

I often find myself at odds with the pervasive role of the internet (and screen-technology) in my public and private life, so this will be the struggle in keeping this going. But I feel a growing urge to communicate more, to come to the table of language at regular meal times, including prose, sitting in the kid's chair looking up to David Antin and Eileen Myles.

Blue Line to O'Hare

2009-11-14T18:29:00.003-05:00

after Tulsa Conference and Chicago Weekend

traveling backwards
towards O'Hare
belly full
de burrito
like a Willy-Nilly
I walked into
outside Tropical Optical

train surfaces into
aberrant daylight

to Eric W Gelsinger
C Barrett Gordon
Luke TJ Daly
MA Slosek
Toni Haugen
Ricky Unger
Goose, who I love, but BG doesn't know
T Elrond Baker
and RB Polamalu

seeing you all at once
is a great drug
you make me laugh hugely
like a rich man
like a big dumb kid
waking up
on a Buffalo Sunday
when you make fun of my poems
the open nights
the Shoshone Park poems

but now it's Monday
and everyone's off to their lives
and I'm off to Buffalo
back to Becky and Eden
and whispers of the next one . . .

back underground through Belmont
where faces in the glass make it rain
like RB said
and Goose did
rode the red line south from Barrett's beach
where Goose made two poops!
there around the Lake

for Luke,
king of the Tropical Optical perch
may Long Island softies
bring you lofty earthly
delight

back to daylight
like when you deep fry a chicken
carcass
and shoot it with a potato cannon
through Slosek's dad's new addition
an 'Oswego Softball"

and to Eric
co-author of the dictionary
as Eddie B might say
your flock of sheep
is a giant rainbow
your white guns
are really sweet
tender footed
laugh track
of dead stars
broke lines at 18
never went back
like Anselm B

and Tawrin Baker
the real Macauley Culkin
is when you drive 4 hours
to smoke a pack of marlboros
with an emptied heart
or is that an Indiana Gumdrop?
do you remember being born?

riding in the middle of the highway
(do you remember being born?)

I wonder why I don't do one of these things
I'm always thinking about doing
like driving my car into oncoming traffic
a la bumper car head-ons
sticking gum into this guys dreadlocks
or eating a Long Island Taco
either way

We saw Matt Klane read at Myopic
the 7 of us
he sd: Dong Bonanza
a portable paradise of wars
it was great to hear
Eric's loud breathing sitting behind me

slowly almost dark
Bank of America says 50 F
near the Cumberland gap
First Midwest Bank says 55 F

almost there hollow
to O'Hare
back into the dark
I miss Becky
and our bed
I miss Eden
and her voice

I already miss you all
and Jonathan too
Tulsa was an unexpectedly sublime
the night sky outside our weird hotel room
the blazing MAYO in the night

and Blue line ends
Alice ended her talk
'never level off'

2009-11-14T17:59:00.000-05:00

2009-11-14T17:53:00.001-05:00

from AP story on LA area mudslide:

"Soon as they heard the rumblings of the mountains coming down, they
all got in their cars and got down in safe areas," Martin said.

Butter and EGGS

2009-07-01T22:49:00.003-04:00

letters from the department
cease desist enter 'regeneration areas'
in warm cracks between sidewalk and brick
[william st, btw elm & michigan, 14203]
prepare to annihilate occlusions
made this grey technicolor sky
but they simply don't exist
there is clear passage for roots on Mars too
(with a pattern not so much symmetrical as borrowed)

golden bacon tattoos Eight O'Clock coffee
seek adequate company
of disturber, many-maker, constipated
Narcissus
mayfly may be lucky alight thee
in predawn cloud bombs

2009-03-28T13:42:00.001-04:00

Birds on the List

I've had two dreams of note
in the last couple of weeks
and only one I can remember right now
which I don't think is a dream in the sense
of some visual dream narrative
but some context of anxiety
I'm in a professional hockey game
sitting on the bench in full uniform
any second now the coach is gonna tell me go
and then I'll jump over the boards
but I can't skate very well at all
and I'm super embarrassed but I try to follow the puck
but I can barely move
and I know i'm gonna get drilled
by some little punk from grade school
who I never liked and was always better than
it's basically the same dream
as the one where you're sitting in class with only your underwear on
which is a pretty powerful sentiment
I mean sometimes I spend half my time
worrying to myself that I'm a fraud
and the other half proving i'm not

the other dream is better
it's deeper somehow and prizmatic
it's beautiful and special
but I can't remember it
I think it had something to do with war
I dreamt at least once maybe twice
I didn't want to forget it
I went around looking for it talking to friends
asking Becky if she remembered me talking about it
and she didn't
but she told me to write about
all the birds I should be so lucky to see
the birds on my list
the ones I've seen
and the ones I'm dreaming to see
and then it hit me, the dream

I was standing in total darkness
when this spectacular bird appeared and flew in front of me
looked at me squarely from the side of its head
it was a heron, large with a long and sharp beak
it had this incredible yellow streak on its crown
and I immediately misidentified it as a yellow-crown night heron
because behind it was black as night
with flashes of yellow and orange along it's crest
but it was almost uniformly blue
enormous
and absolutely unfazed by my presence
a simply beautiful dream
that failed to resound enough
for me to remember it

but I remember wondering when I woke up
if that kind of heron may exist in the world
and if not in the world
it exists now and I'm happy to see it
forget about it and remember it again
and have a chance to describe it

usually how it works is this
you look through the bird books and see the picture
or the peterson or sibley drawing
you try to figure out what time of year you might find it
and in what kind of environment
and then you have to be persistent in looking
but even then you have to be lucky
and if you find the bird it's truly uplifting
its forms a direct and unmitigated convergence of natural histories
the bird's and the birder's
but what of the dream birds, the abstract birds
the pest birds that follow humans
living off waste following the interstates
I won't forget seeing certain birds for the first time
american and least bittern, green heron, bald eagle
or seeing thousands of canada geese at Oak Orchard Swamp
they have been poetic moments

I almost forgot my dream night-heron
but now I won't
writing this poem while hanging out with friends all day today
and having the dream heron come back to mind
and making it public
skating out to center ice getting booed because i can barely move on skates
hoping to make a little something real out of the world
into the world

2009-01-28T22:44:00.002-05:00

For our Valentine's Day issue, we want to know about great dates in Buffalo. These can be real or imagined, so long as they're local.

If you have a good answer and are so inclined, would you please describe that great date in a paragraph or two? Your answer need not be long, though it would be helpful if it were more than a list of places...

Thanks in advance,

Geoff

dear Geoff,

buffalo date

taking a walk in all weather
with a tall boy ot two and/or bottle of wine
criss cross major streets like elmwood or delaware
you don't want to be seen with your tall boy
the cops might not care but if they do
you might have to respectfully pour it out
and then you'll have to head back to store
and lay low on ashland, norwood, bird
or best yet the secluded middle or side of the parkways
and then you'll end up in delaware park
with hopefully still plenty to talk about
and have seat somewhere even though it's cold
the alcohol will warm you up a bit before you leave
and vaguely walk back to wherever you started from
and then generally just take things from there

2009-01-26T21:13:00.002-05:00

all star game vs globe and mail obituaries

john barlow to hockeycabal

I guess you know this will be an A post.

Well, half assed hockey in generic uniforms, what says entertainment like it.
I caught mere seconds of the proceedings at a few intervals and was appalled.
Like grade ten posers, they couldn't bring themselves to really try
to lift the puck onto their stickblade... they abandoned tries. What is this?

And the game: it needs a context, something... Or at least the novelty
of all the players wearing their real team jerseys, collage effect. Enough!

The Globe&Mail obits today far more interesting. Anyone remember
Frank Williams? The famous swurve ball? What a story. Twins Frank and Francis,
pitcher and catcher, mother with tuberculosis and 7 kids already,
after terrible foster families they were adopted by a baseball fan
and developed playing catch, til Frank made the major leagues,
San Francisco, Cincinnati, a brief spell with Detroit.
In the long Idaho winters he'd battle in smalltown boxing matches
despite the risk to pitcher's hand. It all ended when he hit the windshield
in a car accident. In retirement he connected with his long lost father's
family in the Tseshaht First Nation. His later years were rough.
After his brother died in 2000 he was a wreck. Raise a glass
to his glory years.

2 Shane Dronett, six foot six tackle, NFL. 44 sacks in 139 games,
mostly with Atlanta, and a brief stay with Detroit. Born in 1971,
suicide on the 21st of this month. Wife and two kids. Ninethy percent chance
steroids related? Spitting image of Chris Pronger. The glories, the miseries.

3 Dante Lavelli. This one's more like it. He grew up on the outskirts
of Cleveland, playing in the sandlots and fields, super receiver,
lived til 85.

In each case I'm picking up this vibe of the memory of youthful
dreams of sports and sport as dreaming, arriving to great heights,
and then life's undercurrents tear through. I'm thinking of myself as
one of the lucky ones: sure, me and Uncle (nickname of old friend)
developed astounding abilities in the art of throwing, 300 feet,
pintpoint accuracy, whether lazer or thrown 500 feet high,
right to the glove, at tagging height if need be. But, importantly,
we did this while establishing a deep love for organic hallu-
cinogens. And with no regard for worldly accomplishment.
When the sports careers faded like so much writing in chalk
we had a rich phenomenologistical vein of sheer pure experiencing
to fall back on. Nothing can ever really go wrong, it is all
just fascinating. So remember folks, people you care about may aspire
to extraordinary goals, but, as long as they still remember to get
stoned, they will be alright, whether it goes their way, or, not even close.

John

2008-12-31T10:21:00.001-05:00

Poem for ROBIN B.
on the Occasion of her Thirtieth Birthday

we hadn't moved for days
or bathed or talked much
the earth was at siege
no one was outside
we were scared of violating curfew

the snow was deep
and the cops had killed a teenager

it was as if a new set of laws
had taken hold of the apartment
the window plastic went in and out
like a lung

on the fourth day of the siege
robin devised to write a collaborative letter
i was thankful for the entertainment of it
she started it as a formal complaint
a list of problems that needed to be resolved
guns, healthcare, higher education
women's rights, gay rights,
tougher hate-crime prosecution
environmental conservation
and a jobs-for-poets program
called PAW
poets in the american workforce
she repeatedly called for the public
and elected officials to realize
what a poet could do for their communities
and what a having a 'poet in the family'
meant to current and future generations
in terms of informed and comprehensive decision making
emotional and personal enrichment
attention to the spoken word at all times
the ability to see through profound bullshit
that poets were the guardians of culture
not subject to the trends and business of the art world
not rehearsing the stale and/or antiquated forms of music
not writing cheap fiction reliant on shtick

poets are the guardians of culture
but not the culture of the art gallery
or the philharmonic or the cultural center
rather the root of culture that spawns
these listed architectures as sites of official culture
we saw it as a way to revitalize
what has become a tired exercise
in the representation of American art

and it's here we ran into a problem
if we had official democratic PAW positions

available across the country
how could it not become political
as all things involving money and government positions are
how would we prevent this system
from becoming something else
something just as vapid and easily dismissed
as the things we were attempting to distinguish ourselves from?

it was a relief in those dark days in Robin's apartment
to be onto something bigger than the immediate
the snow the police the all day beans and rice meals
we drew up logos for PAW
Robin drew up a poetry tiger with thick meaty paws
I drew up a skeletal paw with Latin words
extending as each digit
I remember one of them was VERITAS
we checked the internet for precedents of any such organizations
we searched "poet worker" "poet public" "poet position"
"poet ambassador" "poet economy" "poet anarchist"
until we found Stephane Mallarme's declaration

"there is only one man who has the right to be an anarchist, Me, the Poet, because I alone create a product that society does not want, in exchange for which society does not give me enough to live on"

this kept us going for a few hours into the night
but what bothered us ultimately was the notion that society did not desire us
we knew they were many poets around us and above us
poets with day jobs
poets in suits
poet plumbers
poets who didn't write poems
poet presidents
poet muderers
poets who don't speak English
poet children
and other ordinary people
who just happen to feel it more

by morning
the snowplows came out
which was a sign things we're breaking up
at 11 am the radio said it would be safe to go outside again
by 5:00 pm
no curfew
violence had been contained

we were struggling to reach a resolution for PAW
the best i could do is to say
that PAW poets for now can't expect money
that money will corrupt and turn any organization
however originally constructed
into something political and ugly
that fascist poets may someday take it away or something
robin only kinda agreed
and i wasn't really convinced either
but we did agree that there was a public vocation as poet
and those who decided to enter it
could count on PAW to support them
not with money though
so we decided for then to call it
Poets of the American Workforce
instead of IN the American Workforce
that we would keep on working our shitty jobs
and keep going to college
understanding there was an unofficial public mandate
for poets to be poets
and those in the know
for now
would be Poets by Mandate

2008-12-19T12:32:00.001-05:00

Bills Fan Poem published online by ARTVOICE

video of me reading the poem

courtesy of ekrem serdar

2008-12-18T13:15:00.002-05:00

letter from the moundz readership:

dear everyone on who drove on the thruway from
October through December 2008 at all times of the day,

I drive a silver honda civic faster than you drive.
For the last twelve weeks I have been trying to get everywhere I have to go.
It's been all rush-rush
I was sometimes drinking coffee,
sometimes I was smoking,
sometimes texting and other times I was talking on the phone,
shifting gears, passing you on the right,
driving 90 miles an hour and slamming on my brakes if you got to close to me even if we were speeding next to a Mack truck in the rain,
sometimes I would be so exhausted I hardly cared if I passed lanes right into you and your entire family,
sometimes I went so slow so - why didn't you pass me?
and whoever you were in the white work van – you are a dick,
to the guy in the half ton red ford truck –fuck you.
To the bitch in the red Monte Carlo – eat a dick,
To the thin prink in the Dodge Durango you could have killed me!
To, the kids in the Pontiac sunfire –you guys were beautiful.

To everyone else I am sorry I drove like a jerk.

2008-12-07T18:20:00.003-05:00

Electric Shock - Woolly Mammoth

there will come a time

in the past when you stuck your finger in

an empty light socket that was turned on

but i'm not here to talk about the future

you've been reduced to half-words

raw groans and hand gestures

muscles are aching where they normally don't

inappropriately awoken 40,000 years later in the future

my carcass rudely preserved in a childlike state

along some quiet river in the permafrost

they have come to clone me

but everything post-Gutenberg confuses me

it gets hard to keep track of the Jews and the non-Jews

i'd like to be back in that river of the future

where the collective highway lamps pump juice

on a place where old books are read in a dazzling silence

like a buzz that mumbles it's half speech

to the crowd inside you of eager listeners

i'd like to be an animal or just Ted Williams

riding a timeless sound wave

for the people who are alive to experience it

"The horse began to turn beneath him. It was still turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining."

-César Aira

2008-12-03T16:36:00.004-05:00

Bills Fan

it's third down
on mt everest
my dad at the bar says
mt everest is the highest
but not the most difficult

it's third down and extremely long
there's an overbearing wind
dressed in another teams uniform
that's blowing and blowing
right in bills fan's face

security is on alert
a balloon knocks the stadium's power out
there are no lights on in the bathrooms
bills fan is pissing wherever
the sink
the mop bucket
the floor
his pants

it's third down
on K2
the bills may never score again
the kicker has left the stadium
the kicker is a painter
he has left to go home
into his basement studio
and paint another triptych
in his 'riders of the apocalypse' series

the bills just got scored on
we're not sure how
my dad recites the kol nidre prayer
"i renounce and deny any affiliation
with the buffalo bills . . ."
the bar goes quiet
the sky which had always been gray
gets heavier
and sucks the drunk red
out of bills fan's face

it's third down
and the bills decide to punt preemptively
the punter takes the field
to 'wild thing' and pumps his fist
bills fan loves a good punt

i piss myself at the bar
it doesn't feel like pee
it feels like the longest tear
my body has ever created
outside a cop car goes off the road
and plows into a Tim Horton's
i can't stop watching the game

it's still third down
and raining yellow snow
ralph wilson stays alive
bills fan renews itself every generation
in the waste areas off the buffalo river
where we all used to get beat up as kids
breaking windows and making teachers cry

the bills get the ball back
first string quarterback is injured
second-string quarterback has peach fuzz all over his face
we don't have a third-string
only the punter comes back onto field
wild thing
you make my heart sing
bills fan gets pumped
the end is near

in the fourth quarter
they turn the scoreboard off
it's third down and one
and the coach calls a flea-flicker
to be thrown by a running back
the ball's in the air
it's so high
it looks like a punt
the Jills go into their wild thing routine
the kicker painter at home
is going expressionist with black oil paints
the bar holds it's breath
just as the ball is falling into a cornerback's arms
a 5 foot 3 receiver runs under it
and splits the defense
this is better than a punt
he's the fastest shortest guy ever
and no one will catch him

2008-10-08T10:50:00.002-04:00

Chicory
Cichorium intybus

Lonely blue among bedded grass
ribboned lilac cutesy curtsy wire dangler
sun rays under trees dog piss as per legal advice
put on longest unfurling string mycologist’s howl
bowels of soup dreams bellows barks
curved stem streetlight witness bus wheels
whispers wine dark steps drunk grasshoppers
that high pitch cricket buzz unseen
but you hear and see such things transpire
are not scared nor silent in spiral terms held
spellbound licking carbon dew

2008-10-08T10:28:00.002-04:00

WHEREAS Ron Sullieman is the Al Gore of poetry
WHEREAS Ron Sullieman is "our daddy"
WHEREAS Aaron Lowinger is a ghost writer
WHEREAS Ron Sullieman's poetry constitutes a name as such
that cannot be imitated, compromised, and/or sullied

THEREFORE All my work has been written by Ron Sullieman.

-Ron Sullieman

2008-10-08T10:27:00.001-04:00

for c. fritton, who is always giving off heat and light

In one experiment, the brain of a mouse was transformed into a kaleidoscope of color by tagging different nerve cells with different fluorescent proteins.

wouldn't that be something chris?

2008-10-07T01:58:00.000-04:00

Leave a Message

"It is the year 2008
and I have found Jesus Christ
so those who I want to call back
I will
and those who I don't
it's because I have Jesus now"

(beep)

2008-10-07T00:12:00.000-04:00

Robbery Attempt Ends

attempted to rob
a gas station
but fled when customers
came into the store

left empty-handed
told the clerk
he was joking and
“was paid to do this”

After following the clerk
into the store,
told her it was a robbery
reached into a pocket and said,
“Now here comes the gun”
No gun was seen

had thick, black curly hair with some gray
had a pot belly
and V-neck sweat shirt

2008-07-25T14:38:00.001-04:00

A coworker related the following dream:
I came into work not here at this building but different
and at my desk there was only a stool
a short wooden stool without any wheels
something that looked uncomfortable
and I was mad and I said
"Where's my chair, who took my chair?"
and they told me Al Cohen took my chair
and then I got even madder
"Why does he get to take my chair?"
and they told me
"Well, he's got connections."

2008-07-22T12:23:00.002-04:00

This is my new book of ecologically sound, love poems inspired by night. By ecological, I mean I don't take the people, places, or things (all the neighbors) for granted. I put them right into the poems. I self-published an earlier edition of these poems in 2006. The first half of this book is that book, ending with the line, "and then God said/ let there be even more Earth." And then it goes on from there. Right to the back cover, to be precise. You can order one of these right from the source, at Transmission Press, for the price of cheap cheap, uptown dirt ($3.50).

2008-07-22T11:31:00.000-04:00

Witnesses Watch Woman

firefighters, police divers, Coast Guard personnel responded
woman seen jumping into the River
from the foot of Street

She floated about 200 yards down-river
Civilians on island helped pull woman to shore

was exhausted from her time in the water
did not say why she jumped into the river

2008-06-20T09:51:00.003-04:00

Day by the lake

woke up ate babka at Mike’s parent’s house on the lake
with bagels and pike place starbucks coffee
‘it’s the original starbucks coffee at their first café’
head on down to Oswego harbor to meet mike’s dad
and his friend are retired from Fulton schools
they get the boat ready for hours the maiden voyage
of his new but ‘pre-owned’ or ‘gently-loved’ (as the case may be) sailboat
we go into town to get more coffee and bomb out the men’s john
back to the boat they are almost ready
Mike’s dad is a real man
we pull the boat out of the harbor with the outboard
and situate ourselves in the lake
no wind
the heat makes me break out and sweat and I feel nauseous
this is my first real sailing trip and I’m sick
I spend my time trying to not pay attention to anything
Mike’s dad keeps looking at the sky and saying ‘what are the tell-tales’
it’s clear all the way around with anvil looking clouds
but warnings of surprise thunderstorms that could flip the boat over
I watch the sky all day waiting for catastrophe or puking or both
but no such luck of anything no wind no nothing
there’s dark clouds around us at times forming different aspects in all directions
studying the weather as the day’s visible quantifier
all I normally never see in the Buffalo or care to heed
the blank and obvious information of the sky
what are the tell-tales telling us?
we turn the engine on to get the boat down the lake
to another harbor passing the three nuclear reactors next to an Audubon society reserve
Mike’s dad points out all the luxurious new homes
he knows where everyone lives
the retired cops, the slum lords, an ex-factory owner, the darkening sky
it ends in a light rain in catfish harbor with sunburns and still queasy
get in Becky’s car and charge it back towards Buffalo
past the spot I found a huge dead turtle the day before
and the resident gold finches great blues every time I turn around this weekend
I see various very dark storms along the thruway
trying to stay awake
hearing various radio reports about hail, rain and tornadoes
hit one heavy rain where one car was in a ditch
driving into Buffalo through a kid-filled neighborhood
in this trashed over world I get a powerful shiver for it
in my let's Rx the world t-shirt I imagine the swamps and forests
I get a one-second chill that wells up my eyes
and determine to write about it
see Eden in time for golf-ball sized hail
Mike calls me up to say his dad just shot a rabid raccoon
out of a tree down the street by the lake

2008-06-06T08:34:00.005-04:00

A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records

THE TIMES

there's voices in vine dark still
drumming churches into ancient grapes
hamburgers are being eaten across flat plains
we will have no more salt for the fruit of meat
your star is plastic aberration faintly breathing
far away sublime sounds shepherd's pie flavor
with natural colors quiet idiot night
offers few answers about where you may lie
by season's end old mesic field sprouting morning joy
our bodies fertilizer and mossy bog teeth
unearthed under ice like Northwest passage survivors
soul undevoured after long blankness
o insolent silent long-suffering silvery silence
cloaking meadows beneath moon wandering beams
define transient mixing coolness along limit lines
divide ghost from substance being all

2008-05-15T23:21:00.001-04:00

MAN ENGROSSED

Man walking
on railroad tracks
engrossed in a scratch-off lottery
struck by a train.

"The train was blaring its horn
for 45 seconds or a minute straight,"
he never heard the horn."

was returning from fishing
walking between the rails
with his head down
examining the lottery ticket
train approached from behind

nurse from neighborhood
responded quickly and detected a weak pulse

2008-05-13T14:41:00.001-04:00

and no the a an but or if
over in to by for up out

Few crumbs mark out
outer limits meaning to suggest
yer legs went damn numb
complete an underwater fire
over which to dig up survivors
might drop word on five hundred lovelies
trust rails write and scrub tombstones
there’s zero hell below us
but plenty of neighbors being annyoing
five years marching into white spaces
now scanning horizons for brown and green
it’s enough we believe multiple use Hades
will stand tall emblazoned by neon
dead hungry our raven eyes brilloed
we pay no matter what
fragmitis knotweed undergrowth
electric maples’ perspicacity of landfill hills
wrong things if you care hear.

2008-04-21T09:40:00.002-04:00

rhyme game

all night station
such a wonderful vacation
windows with arch tops
lit up shit pots
andersons and johnsons
lepers farm wisconsin
holy tiny rounders
masticated lemony flounders
orange stripey cutaneous shell
shoppers shop sundays only pell-mell
if i were a wheel and you a sun
drunk by noon and me shun fun

2008-03-09T21:19:00.002-04:00

2008-02-29T23:38:00.002-05:00

2008-02-29T23:37:00.000-05:00

ALL NATURAL

back at the station
surrounded by police, media
family members in spot lights
a train pulls out but there’s no engineer and no passengers
a train with no destination
I swoop down on a rope carrying answers

2008-01-29T00:31:00.000-05:00

Armed man robs Niagara Street store

held up
pointed his gun
ordered customers to get on the floor

wearing a black mask and black gloves
according to Northwest District

pointing his gun at the cashier
held a blue plastic bag
cashier to put the money in bag
told her that she was "too slow"

2008-01-29T00:19:00.000-05:00

open night

sentenced
to everlasting night
feeds a pigeon
its own down
and makes the shine
a watercolor quality
let alone
the thing to be admired itself
like a streetlight
now is the way
the home a cavern
what to do
i go to the store
but there’s nothing to buy
go home again
put my head sideways
fill the hall with windows
listen to the water
moving around me

2008-01-20T12:18:00.000-05:00

travelogue

take a crap at work
give your housemates a gift

your world is a big stomach
sifting grapes

there’s Greenland!

bon bons
Aufschnitt
Waldmeister
ginger
boxcutter
case of Weisse
some frischlinge

all the uneaten danish
of the world

beaten down
the animals never die

when you give people money
for prepared food

the letter end
tea was cooked
the dawn and tracks
24 is ok to have kids
in the early vine she lived in Georgia
and liked him it was the passion
it was her idea
a patriotic obligation
it was all in her brain
she was cleaned through
but anyway it changed between them
at the end of February
she spoke with George
she was totally disturbed
just imagine my only good friend
has gone crazy
you must help me
we can’t let it happen
and began to be drunken
the nurse closed the door
almost 200 hundred people

TRAIN
Neustadt
Nauen
Regional bon-bon
ferries with
over Paulinenaue
Wittenberge
Glöwen Bredden
Bad Wilsnack
city of cars!
Ludwigslust
eat here
eat an ostrich
Ausstieg links!

Society comes up
sits on your knee
we all deserve a clean train
Don’t you read the Newspaper!
No smoking for two years

the sun comes up
and just sits over
the tree
comes in the window
stays still for hour

2008-01-20T12:03:00.000-05:00

Would-be robbers have second thoughts

Updated: 01/18/08 6:52 AM

An East Side man handed over his loose change during a robbery Wednesday night, but the men handed back his money, police reported.

The bizarre turn of events unfolded at about 10 p.m. while the man was standing on the porch of his home on Beverly Road, near East Delavan and Jefferson avenues, according to Northeast District police.

Police said the man was confronted by three men in dark hooded shirts who displayed a silver handgun and demanded money.

The man complied, handing over his loose change, but the assailants returned his cash and told him that he was “cool.”

Police said the assailants ran south on Jefferson.

2008-01-20T11:51:00.000-05:00

heiligabend

holy be the collard greens
the smelling salts
the sabres coming back
or the snow
the crooked days
and days of trees
the insignificant
the big screens and best buys

i love all this gold around me
bubby children two for ones
forest pink eyeballs
why does it sound so wet
are there martens on mars?

be the bath foams
the huts
the outskirts
be the spike and the seed underneath the spike
be the diseased
the buds of spring
the time of one’s time
and all the food
the nostrils
the saunas of this world
the garbage taxes and bills
be one
be the screen
holy be night
and excess
the mounds of it

2007-11-26T19:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr Coolidge,

There was no fanfare at the gate
nor magic holed up in the bottles of ketchup
I had been to basement sir to see there the stools
the dark folds of wood around the bar
the smell of a funeral home
from some past administration
they folded my napkin inside my water goblet
the same one which served the Lions Club
the wallpaper which you saw and the carpet
your lover sits wrinkled aping at a drink
we take her picture with a glass of scotch
barely strong enough to stand
smell of salt potatoes fills the room
roasted chicken roast beef pasta with marinara
frozen vegetables cut up resteamed with panfry
Mr President, now we have roads everywhere
but the food is much better when you order off the menu
the squirrels in this burg are not very ambitious

2007-11-26T18:43:00.001-05:00

the sun is bright
the moon is dead
and you’re a headlight
on my bed

2007-11-26T18:34:00.000-05:00

my
black muskie
cursed are you
playing your system
and not budging an inch
you skin is callous
no thing sees
there is metal in the river
with no reflection
silt running off into night
it has bones like a dog
or so goes the lullaby
under a car bridge
with a lot of sound

2007-11-13T22:15:00.000-05:00

IT WAS a time
when the night was young
and Maine was next to the sunrise

the kid
with a flip-top mouth
kept crushing diamonds

the true of living
ignites a symphony

cars on strings
infamy is everywhere waiting

put an ex in the sky
where the music seeps through

2007-10-12T15:04:00.000-04:00

THE EYE OF GOD. Fantastic and Beautiful images
Tequila and Salt
Someone that you don't even know exists loves you
Every night, SOMEONE thinks about you before they go to sleep
Hang in there don't die
Don’t say that.
Why is beyond me.
She was born in 1928. And died.
We find pennies in the kitchen.
One was from 1928.
But the agency is closed.
Lost in the World
They span inside themselves
Only nothing.
Paper leaves.
In the custody of the commissioner,
We of Erie County
Hereby and duly sworn
Move to Purge thee from thy fast dwelling
And absolve thee and all related parties
From any role in the above preceedings.
Yours,

2007-09-26T00:12:00.000-04:00

CLEAN

going up there for that clean time
that white space between
all the trees are deciduous
no animal is nocturnal

you can screw in light bulbs
in these secret spots inside your eye
and never see another sunset

2007-09-17T22:18:00.001-04:00

DARLING MUSKIE
make yourself known
on earth
you saw that tern
flash on the surface
and swallowed him whole
even terns deserve justice
you are deformed among creatures
your legs carry only your eggs
but blessed
fish of 10000 casts
you have the court clerks
mystified
your legend only grows
accordingly

gather no moss muskie
between 48 and 56 degrees
spawn in the reeds
eat everything in sight

2007-09-10T20:06:00.000-04:00

DREAM of the Muskellunge

oh brain
what expires how often
lie in the reeds
grow tiger
your stallion teeth
own river ring
open
what are you
but an ugly pike
a 40 pound lung
at the bottom of the bottom
what All
can fit in your mouth
sits behind your jaw
like an asshole
eating the river
destroying water
what are you
oh brain
what can you do
about it
the kids will ask questions
you can’t lie to them
in the next America
on Mars
I will stock you
in a frozen lake
and generations to come
will try to fish the shit out of you
dear muskie

2007-09-10T20:05:00.001-04:00

once you ugly there’s no getting back to pretty
dude I just watched myself explode
a pall was cast on the entire stadium
we’ll all get a sense of relief to put you behind bars
looks like clear skies for the morning commute
the lake was still the new moon night
I wanna be a wheel one day I wanna be a wheel
ruffed grouse is the chicken of the forest
he didn't immediately return a message left on his cell phone by The Associated Press
after being a positive voice for change
several people are being held without bail tonight
“to quiet the clatter of the mind”
the stars out there pop out at you reflect on the water
good night Tim Horton’s, Esso, Hostess, Kinder, Frito-Lay

2007-08-21T18:08:00.000-04:00

6:09 pm

with a million dollars
still blocked
somehow doing OK

someone will buy us drinks

just as before oh my
as it says in the news

2007-08-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

thinking of frank

tuesday morning
it was raining

Frank walked to work
the sky was bleeding
or the time he stuck a papercut in mud

the gold in his mouth flashed

get knocked out
into the open

those who praise their own pussy
get pregnant in the ass

2007-08-15T13:16:00.000-04:00

Once you get into it
Makes the world go round
hospitals on hills all shiny
the kids are out of control
eating plastic corn and smiling
the body's flora conspiring
newspapers with no words

It makes the world go round

2007-08-15T13:05:00.000-04:00

Love at the End of the World

Had a dream my alarm was going off
someone was going to die
not hearing the world outside
not wanting to die
a sandstorm, a trooper
a million clapping hands
chatter of a stream
while the TV sleeps

2007-07-26T11:09:00.001-04:00

Let the gummi bear grow
Watch me go one leg at a time
Paint it up social security man
Wash your eyebrows everyday
Filmy plastic residue
Your dreams are costing me money
Get out and holler Tuesday
People of the World, rejoice!

2007-07-24T14:29:00.000-04:00

THROUGH THIS non-profit organization well over 1 million people have come to know Christ

MAGIC ATM MACHINE always an extra twenty

DOING MY PART sleeping in briar patch

2007-07-24T14:06:00.001-04:00

The wind is a document
A body in clutch resting
Let all somnambulists be touched
Four churches at each corner
Fat black cats triptrap
And eating for two people
Locust tree not greedy with the sun
Born over into fingers
Where the undergrowth is examined
Queen Anne, sumac, milkweed
Grow furry night
Whisper the bells
What happens
Put a line across a road
Everything grows off it

2007-06-29T09:28:00.000-04:00

MONDAY EARLY SUMMER threatened by bully gulls and buses

COACH SHULA lost 32 pounds with 2 weeks of free meals

TELL THE CHILDREN why we chopped all the trees down

OPEN NIGHT: I would dig out a lake for you

WORKING THROUGH and beating'em every time

PREVIOUSLY THE VARIOUS contra missions yesterday of the sun

EVERY INTERVENTION all the time effective

2007-06-15T14:46:00.001-04:00

juked, bluffed and faked
mad dash.
it paid off -- twice
into his second balk
"I just tried,"
"and it worked."
trotted home with the tying run
"We're good at it,"
throw home to put San Francisco ahead

“started and stopped,"
began dancing down
seemed to break his hands apart
waved home
"It's not my problem,"
"His job is to pitch and my job is to hit."
A magic-marker board in the Giants' clubhouse
also listed Lincecum, with this next to his name: "Bring It!"
the boo-birds were out early.
it's part of Major League Baseball's plan to keep peace in the stands.

2007-06-15T10:16:00.001-04:00

Not eating sunflower seeds
Living the dream goofing off at work
Got headphones on like I’m in on some secret
A secret I only really know about and they don’t
They don’t even know it’s a secret

Is day day today?
The sun looks tough enough
The churches still standing
But what happened to the dinosaurs?
Oh God Bless America
Third planet from the sun

2007-06-04T18:01:00.000-04:00

NO MONEY DOWN interest free 180 days

STARLINGS just look like blackbirds from a distance

GRAND LARCENY precedes a hearing at the grand jury

YOUR GENERATION will murder us with social security

VOICES IN MY HEAD tell me to love my daughter and commit to social justice

2007-05-29T23:37:00.000-04:00

Very quick. Sugar on his bat. A marshmallow in her sky. He is always talking. But she would tell her girlfriends oh he's just acting. Until one day. Strawberry marshmallow. It's for real this time. Get toothpaste on her clothes every time she brushes. Her dad became Jehovah's Witness and couldn't talk to her anymore. Enter the drinking moon. A phosphorescent piece to each. Moon pie. The moon made of spider webs and gummi worms. She says she likes it when he's in control. Baby's got her blue jeans on.

2007-05-15T22:07:00.001-04:00

the game-winning two-run double I cranked out to left
in my first game in the prep league
off flame-throwing Jamal Henderson-
I saw the ball just sitting there
up in the sky

2007-05-14T14:01:00.000-04:00

2007-05-14T13:55:00.002-04:00

open night

while the unseen night reaches in
and the windows are expanding
a lot of things here outside
the time cat clamped down on my cheek
the PBS tower crowded out by leaves
mother of wonder night calls
from you hair to your feet
out left out right
middle and center
the back the sides
more than ever please here
the side I’ll sleep on
until the walls all laugh
so loud the garden hears

2007-05-14T13:55:00.001-04:00

execution at clothespin castle
loop snip and buckle
hey multi-media guy
die
and please don’t have any kids

2007-05-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

raw box
you know that guy in dc
he makes books
girls cry
liar wearing flip flops after a night stood good together