Let’s get naked and dig The Doors
Let’s be German between the wars
Pitch our tents in the finer stores
And chant down Babylon’s hockey scores
Embarrass our riches
Discover our pores
In bed with a belly-up Texan who snores
In debt to our atavist dinosaurs
Instead of the capital bankers and whores
The future’s devoid of the obvious bores
And the sun doesn’t blow in the end
It roars
I read Ray Pospisil’s Insomnia at a National Poetry Month reading honoring the poet at the Elizabeth, NJ, Public Library this afternoon.
Painting by Frank Auerbach
I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.–Harvey Pekar
I recognize this guy
who went to your schools but flopped
at your cocktails. Nobody dropped
his name and you reply,
“He only learned to type”.
All right. But isn’t life
preponderantly rife
with typing? A guttersnipe
in your book, and a lout
in mine with angsty moves
on paper napkins and the grooves
of jazz establishing a route
to penscratch narratives
and all he has to show.
Respect. Because you never know.
All studies are comparative.
It’s the little fuck-ups that you come
to love. The evidence of cigarettes
and alcohol, the rattle in the drum,
and how a cardboard box of tape cassettes
presents the faded document of youth—
an open call already in the can
and cracking on a plastic wheel. The truth.
That sweet malfunction of the master plan.
___
Photo: “Larry and Ben” by T.R. Loyd
Our beards are soft and gray as morning ash,
endowed with parables and cigarettes.
Our coats, a vagary of petty cash,
describe the button holes in safety nets.
And if this station cracks beneath our boots,
the cold, erasing rain may knit us suits.
For Marie
On Sunday morning I showed up
to find you calm and sitting up,
your brown eyes tired but alert
and bright. They told me that it hurt
to move—a wisp of Percocet
in open light. The TV set
was dark and silent. Still you seemed
to stare into an image beamed
across the room. A shadow play.
A mirror into Saturday.
An anesthesia flower show,
it ended when I said, “Hello.”
Roosevelt Hospital, New York City—
We hike down to the bottom of the Rambla,
maybe to report a stolen wallet.
The statue of Columbus stands so tall, it
casts a sundial shade on the ensemble,
fat and foreign, lolling through the stalls
of animals and flowers. Turning right,
we pass the Hotel Gaudi where the night
is calling as it does when twilight falls.
A little further in this corridor
we give up hope of finding the police.
The bars disgorge their guilds to the caprice
of crime where cracked graffiti chafes a door
that totters, bleeding like a razor wound,
a smokey light congealing in an ark
of misery. And from the cobalt park
across the street, we hear a croaking sound,
an ancient whore who cackles as she’s taken
from behind in what at first appears
to be a murderous attack. The jeers
about the square convince us we’re mistaken.
That we’ve come too far. That it is we
who might need help. Or that we’re helpless now,
anonymous, uncompassed on a scow
of shipwrecks in a road behind the sea.
Barcelona, June 22, 2009
______
Photo by Lacomba
An epic poem on the life of Chaim Soutine, available from Dos Madres Press and Amazon.com.
My new collection , Coelacanth, is now available from Dos Madres Press and Amazon.
Waiting for Cassowary 
