Poet Of The Week Grey Vild November 16–22, 2015

M4T

This guy really loves his wife, almost as much as Scott loves his dogs. This guy is straight and really hard up. This one is just that straight. This one can’t believe I’m not real. This one will fuck anything, women follow him off trains. He tells me how I could have my pick of, if only, he could get it up. This guy is like fucking a tube of toothpaste. Someone should tell him the word “pee-hole” is not sexy. My mouth is full. This guy is what a diet of pizza and ranch dressing tastes like. We’re friends. This one is really gay. This one is really excited to run into me on the train. This one just wants to talk about it. This one is gender fluid, so he understands. This one’s got that bro pussy look in his eyes. This one looks like Rafi and just knew I was gonna come. This one can’t figure out which closet he belongs in and spends all his time tying his ties. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He works with special needs kids and coaches wrestling and doesn’t have time for a relationship anyway. This one just knows he’s not a faggot. This one sends me pics of his girlfriend sucking his dick. This one sexts filth for a month then hardly says a word. He’ll hmu when he’s in Brooklyn again. This one swears he won’t come inside. This one opened the door, looked me in the eyes and realized he forgot to buy beer. That was the last time we saw daddy. This one is really pretty and shows me all his wigs and tits after. This one’s on more T than I am. This one just wants to talk about it. This one was a 2 pump chump but I got 5. This one used to love his wife, almost as much as Scott loves his dogs but now, he doesn’t. He shows me pics of her. And pics of her sucking his dick. This one’s got real shitty taste in porn and tastes like a rusty cigarette. This one got my number from the roommate I used to fuck before we began our infamous race to the bottom. This one’s not into beards. This one thought I would look more like a girl. This one has always been attracted to people like me. This one just wants to talk about it. This one explains what his tattoos mean. This one can’t believe I’ve never done poppers and brings them like an offering. This one’s fursona is a lion. This one organizes an entire gangbang that gets derailed in New Jersey Transit. This one sends me pics of his girlfriend sucking his dick. This one asks what my real name is. Tobi says lumpy-toothpaste-peehole guy is posting again. This one has experience with ftms and “is cool with it.” This one is beautiful in that way that’s frightening. If I saw him on the street, I’d want to hurt him or protect him. I don’t know which would be worse. This one asks me to shave. This one asks me to keep my shirt on. This one won’t stop texting. My last response was 3 weeks ago. This one gave me an impromptu makeover at Housing Works and convinced me to buy this red shirt that makes me look like a gay picnic. He’s bisexual but more attracted to men and he’s a top but finds anal uncomfortable. He’s always wanted to have kids. He’s so glad to have met me. I blow him on the pier to feel like a real faggot for once. This one thought I was just a regular boy who loves cats. This one asks if he can take a pic of me sucking his dick. This one is roughly the size of a tank and drinks Smirnoff Ice. This one’s hands are cold and feel, somehow, detached. This one wants to commiserate about women. He thinks my ex’s transphobic until I tell him she’s trans. This one’s real hairy and drunk and our St. Christophers clang together unsexily. This one had his dick in one hand, a cigarette in the other and I don’t remember anything after that.

Lily Myers - "Shrinking Women" (CUPSI 2013)

Justin Petropoulos Poetry and thoughts on Movement

[the once bare window]

by Justin Petropoulos

She watches the moon melon and the rind of oaks. At this stage of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process the edges of bod­ies are marked. Her legs the shut­ters for the once bare win­dow, tak­ing hinge in the frame. Light swal­lowed hard away behind them.

She feels the house, their foun­da­tion, arthritic, set­tling. Afraid, she wants for the oth­ers, desires them—wants them to run, but they just watch her strug­gle. This process is known as reading.

There is applause. You can see it in their eyes. The faucet for­gets basin-ward. She has them like a dream. The shut­ters kick. As part of the stamp­ing operation.

Reading intends. A mea­sure, dis­cour­ag­ing. The shav­ing or clip­ping of bod­ies was unsanc­tioned. She opens her mouth and creaks, but­tons down her sweater, cra­dles the oth­ers awake.

 http://sussitout.org/once-bare-window

http://vimeo.com/34931978

Out in the Open

1.

Late autumn labyrinth.
A discarded bottle lies at the entrance to the wood.
Walk in. The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned rooms.
Only a few, precise sounds: as if someone were lifting twigs with tweezers;
as if, inside each tree-trunk, a hinge was creaking quietly.
Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they’ve shrivelled up;
they are like the personal effects of the disappeared.
It is almost dusk. You need to leave now,
find your landmarks again: the rusted implements out in the field
and the house on the other side of the lake, red-brown
and square and solid as a stock-cube.

2.

A letter from America set me off, drove me out
on a white night in June through the empty suburban streets
among built blocks, cool as blueprints, too new to have memories.

The letter in my pocket. My unquiet raging stride a kind of prayer.
Where you are now, evil and good really do have faces.
Here, it’s mostly a struggle between roots, numbers, transitions of light.

Those that run messages for death don’t shy from daylight.
They govern from glass offices. They swell in the sun.
They lean over their desks and look at you askance.

Far away from that, I find myself in front of one of the new buildings.
Many windows merging into one window.
The light of the night sky and the swaying of the trees are caught there:
in this still mirror-lake, up-ended in the summer night.

Violence seems unreal
for a while.

3.

The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low,
throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.
A man crouches over something in the field.
The shadow reaches him.
For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross.

I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches.
Sometimes it seems like a snapshot
of frenzy.
____
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robin Robertson

For a Poet

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth's breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.


Countee Cullen

A MOUNTED UMBRELLA

by: Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)


What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange.

"A Mounted Umbrella" is reprinted from Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms. Gertrude Stein. New York: Claire Marie, 1914.

My Shifted World

Tony Overman/The Olympian, via Associated Press. As evolutionary biologists see it, each species' life span is adapted to the nature of its environment. The maximum lifespan of bats, for example, is 3.5 times greater than flightless mammals of the same size, the research shows.

Nocturne

tell me all things false and true,
bitter sweet, that fools are wise;
i will not doubt nor question you;
i am in s mood for lies.

tell me all things ill turn good;
thew and sinew will be stronger
thriving on the deadly food
life proffers for their hunger

paint love lovely, if you will;
be crafty,sly, deceptive;
here is fertile land to till,
sun-seeking, rain receptive.

hold my hand and lie to me;
i will not ask you how or why;
i see death drawing nigh to me
out of the corner of my eye.
- Countee Cullen

Originally posted August 2009 ~ New Jersey

Sentimental Tendencies

Jun 4, '09 2:04 AM

I have passed the doors of coldness
The doors of my bitterness
To come and kiss your lips

City reduced to a room
Where the absurd tide of evil
leaves a reassuring foam

Ring of peace I have only you
You teach me again what it is
To be human when I renounce

Knowing whether I have fellow creatures

Ring Of Peace-Paul Éluard

Photo by Ed Ruscha

Faithless - Insomnia

Stuart Bain | MySpace Video

Lovely and Lifelike

Apr 8, '09 8:59 AM

A face at the end of the day

A cradle in day's dead leaves
A bouquet of naked rain
Every ray of sun hidden
Every fount of fount in the depths of the water
Every mirror of mirrors broken
A face in the scales of silence
A pebble among other pebbles
For the leaves last glimmers of day
A face like all forgotten faces

Paul Eluard

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

		February 2010 in Artforum http://www.artforum.com
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"The Art of Danh Vo."

Gertrude Kasebier's "Yoked and Muzzled- Marriage" (c1915)

Fear of an Empty Life

by


Jennifer Moxley



All the long imprint of a smooth utterance - a single adhesive
word slips away, snuggles beside the accusatory newborn
thought which, barking from lack of care, might trap in a moment
of serious sorrow me and my dirty heart, we twist the arm
of friendship 'til the ancient swing by the nonchalant body
is rewritten as a trembling, angry, grudge. Split along
the physique axis of wrested love and that human pulp
the wealthy mock, old need, a shuffle from the coffin lip
silences mind into fiddlehead body, bobbing in the fifty-fifty
sheets, weighty yet so pitiful it cannot coax solution - Darwin
was a fool, conductor of teeming masses, I see them now
in sedimentary patterns, crushed umber colors and a hint of green.

I am content when I do not think the disclosure of love is a
weakness, I imagine myself invincible like a bully who sees
in the fear he coerces from his weaker brother the only version of
truth he'll believe - satisfied sleep. I awake drenched, the sweat
between my breasts which are so small they cannot touch is slick
as mucous. The surface of beauty is awful and enormous to all of us
who are left behind and yet we seek our coordinates, willfully
follow them just the same as the moon might seem from certain
angles to willfully follow the earth. Choking pink ribbon of thought
fails the ferry crossing. Who cannot push life-sustaining rationalization
away without remembering, as though an error of judgment,
the callow power of preservation turned to resentment of the race.

It cannot, no matter, in verse, be real. Fucked up beauty
subtracts the awkward ugly plain ache of tripped-up memory stores
where I see you as a taut wing of fragile older skin whose pride
of effort flaps in an attempt to fly amidst its own disintegrating
structure, a sight so ridiculous that all but the buried are unable
to suppress their laughter and turn away. That's an image hovering
above me here where there is still in my imagination a cool carpet
underfoot, a flavor of drug's seductive distances, the expense of
early exits but no gun, never a gun. That weapon steals time for it
knows not what's in a minute. Tiny blindfold box of selfish stomach,
parasite life, the measure of a second is insufficient
to leave you behind, you and all your crippling indifference.

Song

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

Allen Ginsberg