new poem

...
"The Unworn Sweatshirt"

it's up at everyday genius here

glowworm

photo by Robin Scagell via UK Glow worm survey

Cherry Red's RA

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Spinning gloriously out of control,
collections of frontier lore
presently I found myself approaching
populated places
you think fires start by themselves?

This is the best part of the edge
where one is not oneself.
The warm bath of physical
dissolution, the one real part
of one's temporary personality.

Where does the desire for ethical
action come from? What makes
us want to be ethical?

The great satisfaction of seeing
someone else punished for a deed
of which we know ourselves
capable.

They just mean to be insulting.
I don't know what you want me to
say. What? Whatting a what?
Wanting a what? When you
kiss me I want to die.

Winner and still champion.

And, I realized this was
my thing. To let it fill up
and - don't get hurt or dead -
just as nice - to let it
all run out again.

The rest was easy, well, this is
what the voice whispered to me:
"There was a time when I couldn't
complain, but now it's you."

There was no top bolt, the catch
gave, there was a time I was happy
to know you, I climbed in and pulled
the drapes off my face. No, there is
no good here.

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Collaged from: Californication DVD box back copy, Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire, Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic and the Recognitions, Mary Jo Bang's Alice in Wonderland, Weisenburger's Gravity's Rainbow: A Companion, Schutt's All Souls, Whedon et al's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Roche's Wetlands, Ralph Wiggum the Book, Fiery Furnances's Lost at sea, Baudelaire's Beat Up the Poor, Chandler's The Big Sleep. RA = Reappropriated Ambivalence.

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Kiwi Something

An operative from East Indian Tea approached me last night for travel, no bags. The shop sold dyed carnations. He had a pocket fakir passed down from his grandfather. Paternal side had the goods. It was a bicycle mechanic's Ecclesiastes, For every time there is a season, for every wheel a spoke. We moved fast and ate well, as well as we could from gift shops and lobbies. I gained weight like a parent's trust. Thunder thighs and seven inch hail cellulite. In every station fellow passers I might have loved. Two young women who liked to run. One of them did it all, she organized coffee hours and walked out of her tracksuit like a chrysanthemum petal falling on Tuesday.

Poem For Yayoi Kusama

when I was a little girl
it was a hundred drawings
and that was just before breakfast
now it's a thousand dots
and I'm an old woman
I do all those before lunch

it used to be fists
punching into my face
but that was just my mother
and that face was just me
way back then
I was smaller and
there was still an outside
to run to

I got naked in public
as a young woman
when New York City wasn't a cliché
and Warhol was still Andy
there are films of this

I returned to Japan
and lived in an asylum
which is where I work today
self check in
that shows courage, understanding
a degree to help and function
I've done circles, curves, everything

red dots, on white
blue dots, on aquamarine
yellow dots, on black
and now there's so many

I paint large circles on floors,
walls, the dresses of little girls
who are really sculptures, molds
dots everywhere, and the girls
look at the world and I can't explain it

maybe they ask why
but they don't demand,
it's different and they're standing