John J. Trause reads from Lewis Carroll’s “You are Old, Father William” (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter V) for Poetry at Tasty Coco on Tuesday.

I, an odd boy and no fan of sport,
become obsessed. My team is hated, sort
of, but they’re loved at home. A code of dress
and facial hair. The bought and very best.

Confetti dreams, a shower of office paper
in the old part of Manhattan, is a staple
celebration—only once a vomiting
from hell. So whether it’s Matsui who’s committing
to the low outside or Derek Jeter firing
it to first, I find the game inspiring
and the bullying investment incidental.
Call me green. Hey, call me sentimental.

But if the Yankees take this in the sixth,
just think of all the things that can be fixed.
___
Photo–Aftermath of Yankees tickertape parade, 1999, from Fithy Mess.

Here’s news that prompts me to plug my chapbook. Modern Metrics, the small press that published Aquinas Flinched last year, is now an imprint of Exot books. This is a good thing for various reasons. For example, now, when you click the link in the permanent plug at the upper right corner of Cassowary, it will not only work again, but it will take you to the new home page from which you can, with PayPal or a credit card, order my chapbook, or Mike Alexander’s brand new chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices, or any of the other fine chapbooks originally published by Modern Metrics. Exot explains itself and offers reviews of its publications on the home page. Why not go there now?!

Where Judith blushes and withdraws the knife,
where witches levitate and Saturn eats,
where rotting Peter drags his bleeding wife
across the black evacuation streets,

there is a song. A cudgel through the air
to which the felon strums and ancients spoon
their dusty porridge on the basement stair.
A broken dog laments the dying moon

as covered wagons veer from the Colossus,
decamping with the towns of the Plateau.
The toll road’s spiked with dirty little crosses
and wails of Las Canciones del Sordo.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Oct 11/13/16, 2009

Ontogeny. The feeling that I’ve come
awake. I want to paint again. To write.
I hear you on the telephone tonight

conversing with a voice that’s calling from
the television: Kenya Celebrates.
A grainy feed, some newscast lost in time

comes channeled to the eye as a sublime
phylogeny that crosses latent states.

A recapitulation of the dream—

America is born into the world

again. Democracy awakes at last.
A pixilated species comes uncurled
and scurries over borders in a stream

of colored light, familiar, wild and fast.

November 5, 2008

I will be the featured reader at the Saturn Series reading on Monday night (Oct. 5) at the Nightingale Lounge, 213 2nd Ave (corner of 13th St), starting at 7:30 p.m. I will be reading the “Ginsberg Cantos” of Huncke. There will be an open mic.

My sonnet, “Western Union,” was selected by 14 by 14 for the Love Sonnet edition. Above, we have me reading it last Sunday at Bar on A in New York. See, also, a smashing 14er by Christopher Hanson among the loves sonnets.

Note, further, that my YouTube gallery features several others reading at the Carmine Street Metrics event at Bar on A, namely Quincy Lehr, Wendy Sloan, Nemo Hill, and David Katz.