. . . AS WELL AS. A MAGAZINE OF ART AND WRITING
ISSUE NUMBER ONE
Copyright 2012 by . . .As Well As. Magazine All content within . . .As Well As. Magazine is copyright of . . .As Well As. Magazine and property of the contributors.
Editor - Charly Fasano Layout by Charly Fasano
Cover photo by Charly the city mouse Fasano Contact . . .As Well As. Magazine at facebook.com/aswellasmag aswellasmag@gmail.com
. . . AS WELL AS. A MAGAZINE OF ART AND WRITING
ISSUE NUMBER ONE
jason ryberg TAGGING THE POET
The Poet must be, at all times, lean and coiled (at least in spirit), flowing and darting, swept up and sun-drunk in the whirlwind wildfire of the moment, forever mingled in the swirling, turbulent mix of the Snake and the Crane, the Lion and the Monkey. The Poet is always hungry and therefore, will always have a hungry air about him, in his eye, his words, his walk; he is forever mistaking people and things for food.
But, make no mistake about it, though he keeps low to the ground and sports a sometimes mean demeanor, the Poet is, at the root of himself, an animal of oral communication, all lips and tongue and voltage. In fact, it is with his mouth that the Poet shows others how to speak in languages they never knew they had within them; Swahili, Mandrill, Kuckaburra, Pentecostal. When in neutral, the Poet idles somewhere between the deep-down guttural grumble of the jungle cat, in repose, and the moan of the mutt that is forever rubbing up against things. At the movies, the Poet will always cry for the misunderstood monster, and stomp and holler-out for underdogs, diamond thieves and new world samurai. At the coliseum, The Poet sends a secret prayer To the team that has fallen out of favor and applauds all glorious and shining slams, recoveries, rope-a-dopes and body-checks regardless of where the battle lines have been drawn.
But, most importantly, above all things (and to his eventual and fiery undoing), the Poet will maintain several long-distance love affairs with the seemingly non-sensical.
CENTERING YOUR CHAKRA Nothing especially tragi-glamorous or hardcore blue collar neo-beat about cracking an egg into a beer at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning while watching the 700 Club, nothing world-wearily decadent or anti-romantically nu-kowskian about not having filed a tax return for who knows how many years, now, nothing in there that’s gonna net you an honorable mention (or even a minor addendum) in anybody’s rolls, records or register of highly conspicuous anti-socials (except maybe your own, of course). And it looks like it’s a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, this time, and maybe a pull off the Old Overholt Rye (what some of us around these parts like to call “Old Reach-Around”), maybe even one or two more (of each) to facilitate the (Lordy, Lord, I must say) much-needed shit, shower and shave routine and all before I’ve even had my coffee and/or some semblance of breakfast (really, Mr. Ryberg, what can you be thinking?). And, whereas I can fully understand how and why my mother might not quite be able to wrap her brain around this
(only occasional and, I suspect, primarily male) ritual and might even recoil in low-to-mid-level horror and disgust and maybe even cry a little later when she thinks about what’s befallen her once beautiful baby boy (or, more likely, what he be fallen into), surely the Old Man wouldn’t begrudge me this momentary indulgence or judge, too harshly, me and the lifestyle that I swear I somehow just seem to have woken up inside of, one day. Surely he must have had a few days like this special-air-delivered from the wrong side of nowhere to the ground-zero/crosshairs of his world, back in the day when he was a free-wheeling bachelor about town (despite our fairly divergent paths, worldviews and ways and maybe also the fact that he was a charming, good looking jet-fighter pilot with the classic little black book of numbers and names, a Corvette Stingray and a Jack Kennedy haircut you could set your watch by). Surely he wouldn’t overly depreciate the idea, despite the (very real and aforementioned) differences in our lives, that it’s just something you have to do, every now and then, to locate your zen, “center your chakra” and/or get your head right again before para-trooping back out into the not my job/not my problem, I got mine/you get yours, what have you done for me lately?,
corporate, confederate, theoligarchy of these Distended States of AmurKKKa, Inc. p.s. They say the Lord is coming. Better look busy.
PISSING OFF THE BACK PORCH (OR, GOLDEN LIGHT IN THE SHADOW OF THE COMING DARKNESS) Cars screech and growl at the intersection of 9th and Massachusetts Street like juiced-up linemen surging to fire off the ten-yard line. A crazed Dalmatian chases the last Tiger Swallowtail of summer through the late afternoon and into evening. A train is sounding-off somewhere and the tubercular case across the street hacks and coughs and wheezes out a “sweet jesus!” and the flowers and trees are making one last go of it into the towering on-set of night. And me? I’m just sitting here, wondering what it is I’m supposed to be doing or who or where I’m supposed to be in the grand (or even less than grand) scale of things or what to do with the time and the place at the table
that have been given to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, and all, who couldn’t love this life, or, that is to say the grand idea, anyway, of “the good life” and/or “living one’s life to its fullest” (or even just to its most logical conclusion) even if it is among the misfit toys and banged-up odds and ends and gothic ruins (of mine, or someone else’s less-than-specified designs). Still, sometimes you have to wonder whether it really is nobler to constantly suffer the jibes and slights and sick little jokes of life’s more overly familiar devil’s (and angel’s, alike), especially when, maybe, you don’t have to. Or, do you somehow divine a way to rise above the whole surging, slimy mosh-pit of it all (the ever-increasingly toxic stew of it all) like a flock of water-fowl taking to the sky and fly, fly away, baby,
fly, fly away. What you better get straight, though, is all your cryin,’ pleadin’ and bitchin’ down here at the ground zero of our own making is wasted on dark gods gone deaf (and a little near-sighted, too). Hell, most likely it all winds up as dirt in the ground, anyway. You, your family, your friends and enemies, your cars, your clothes, your big-screen plasma TVs, your quarter-million dollar uber-suburban wharehouse/car-port you call a home, all that shit you kill yourself for that’ll never, ever save you from the ever-looming reducto absurdum of old age and the grave; every damn, least-divisible unit of it; dirt in the ground beneath a mile-high layer of ice the experts are saying will be on top of us any day now. The best you can hope for is a few good laughs and a quick death.
So, while there’s time, maybe you should just go ahead and throw open all the windows and doors tonight: who cares what it’s like outside!? Go ahead and make yourself another Mai Tai or Gin Ricky, Rum Runner or Mojito or whatever and turn that music up, a little, while you’re at it! Drink one for fallen family, friends and enemies alike and feel free to howl with laughter at that silver-dollar moon (‘cause you know, damn well, baby, he’s laughin’ at you,) as you water the Moonflowers and Magnolias with your grief, your joy, your raging thirst for life, your liquid golden light runneth over.
CATCHING A WHIFF An old black dog on a cold black night, ears that sometimes hear and only one good eye but, a stout snout that still sniffs, deeply, the truth from many things and with which he now attempts to catch the tail of a whiff of some fleeting something wafting along on the cold black wind on this cold black night.
THE STORY, SO FAR -with apologies to Arthur Tress Strangely enough, it all starts with Adam West and Eva Gabor (having been cast, here, as a sort of flawlessly wholesome American Hansel and Gretel) gathering up sheaves of wheat in the red-gold glow of a setting sun, the whole thing set to a lush accompaniment of angels with Chinese eyes playing strange, other-worldly instruments. And now, the smoky ghost of a former farm cat, a miniature horse and a miniature shark are just about to embark on a truly incredible journey of potentially epic proportions. And Johnny Socko and Giant Robot are finally done with their daring-do adventuring for another day (having saved the day, once again, from the clutches of the evil Professor Hex and the Dragon Lady from Mars) and are now slowly spiraling down into a deep and dreamless sleep. And Caruso, reviving his most famous role of Pagliaccio, is giving voice lessons to Anne Boleyn (or is it Jane Mansfield) while some bit-part player (you know you’ve seen her a million times, before) done-up in clichÊ
antebellum slave-girl garb is grinning a near-rictus grin and beating out a jungle beat on an old washtub and a tambourine and an (as yet) unidentified goddess or muse is waiting, anxiously, in the wings for her cue. And down in the coliseum, the wise man Laocoon and his sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus are training for their big steel-cage rematch with the hot and deadly snakes of the underworld. And all the while, a butterfly sits dreaming on a railroad spike; a dream of suddenly waking from a dream and finding oneself to be nothing less than The Great American Everyman, himself, who (it will eventually be revealed through a succession of wildly improbable events) has somehow come into possession (one could very easily name it either a curse or a blessing) of a magical toy chicken that lays chocolate eggs covered in 14K gold leaf. No one could possibly predict what happens next or how the whole thing finally ends.
CONSULTING THE STARS WITH MARK HENNESSY And then there are those wide-open October nights out there on the high seas of the lower Mid West, and nothing but stars stars
stars.
And maybe you’ve wandered away from the fire with a friend or two and a bottle of some not dissimilar distillation of heat and radiance (to keep the Universal Engine turning over, of course), and Time, that supremely indifferent retriever and reducer of all things to their least divisible units seems to have momentarily halted in the tracks of its ceaseless stalking of what we so self-centrically imagine to be its sweetest, juiciest prey. And a Greek chorus of coyotes is commenting on the day’s events from the next county over. And a truck somewhere out beyond the horizon’s line of (ever-) diminishing returns blows a long, sorrowful solo. And our phones and clocks (those little sycophantic servants
and advisers and grand co-conspirators, as well, no doubt) have been given their first night off in who knows how long. So, if you want to speak to someone, present company should more than do. And if, for some reason, you find you need to know the Time’s current whereabouts... well, you’ll have to consult the stars.
____________________________________________________________ Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors, and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted Poetics and an aspiring b-movie actor. His latest collection of poems is Down, Down and Away (co-authored with Josh Rizer and released by Spartan Press). He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe. Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com
Lee Sanders Leaning Against the White Stuccoed Wall Autumn brings extended growing sessions Leaning against the white stuccoed wall Watching moonlight adorned September post rain clouds Perfectly silhouetted framed like silver around a vintage broach Thin, elegant and oxidizing in the rain and heat He is waiting for the kettle to whistle Whistle in a town where no trains moan at two in the morning A New Mexico moonscape drapery over sweet cherry peppers And end of the season wilted tomato plants There are mustard plants weeding out the backyard And Lucy is cleaning her child’s pee from the dining room table An ocean and an email away Muskrat’s socks have holes in the heels and toes And there is chamomile tea steeping in an engraved mug… I once wrote the lines that there is no drama in the situation, just orange juice… There is an almost finished Sunday crossword, A number two pencil, whittled, buck knife chiseled Loose leaf scraps with thin blue veins balled in the bottom of a blue backpack Handwritten frustrations Enumerating on writers block away from comforts of computer screens Wendell Berry essays on the bed stand Otis Redding is moaning about these arms of mine There is a loneliness that creates comfort We make lonely into a dirty eruption Two more than a four letter word
Dirty like the bourbon uncorked a year ago untouched on a plastic lined pantry shelf Darling let us make this night hurt Make me desire the clicks of a typewriter’s keys high heels tapping along the chipped tile floor in a beer stained wood paneled dimly lit bar Out of place the pink eraser next to the delete key on a computer the smile on the cashier with her dyed blonde hair at the health food store putting my orange juice and yogurt into a small cardboard box Her black roots exposed like her pink lips parted Not that I am counting but it has been three years and six months Since I pressed my lips against a woman’s face My fingers back space in tempo to Otis singing Mr. Pitiful and it is true I want you, I want you, I want you. I just never know who. Instead of love waltzes to a typewriter I am stuck sliding these rhythm and blues to a laptop keyboard.
Lucy When the words leave her tongue through her fingers Letters on the keyboard, you vibrate through my joints I am surrounded by tomes of poetry scattered about my feet Over white tile, their hard spines and bent covers I want your words in my mouth, your lips wrapped Around my hear, whispering I te amo I want my fingers to run across the back of your neck, The neck of a typewriter as I uncrease years long writers block A lover’s block uncorked and left stained in black ink If there are red shoes waiting on department store shelves There is a slow dance in a dimly lit bar and a kiss Two foreheads pressed close in words and futures Kiss me he whispers, enter my bed, enter my heart Enter my garden, there are pine cones supporting marigolds And muskrat dirt caked paws singing ladybug lullabies Lucy and pine trees, a hot sun embraced by autumnal clouds
Leslie With muddy water running off a light brown news boy cap A fast moving New Mexico scattered shower Punched its way east past the valley into the foothills Over the Sandia Crest as dirty gutter water runs out the holes in his shoes There is baseball on the television, rice on the stove top Greek oregano and chives surrounding sweet cherry red peppers Along metal trellises in the backyard. It’s a Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams night Somewhere west of here, she is reading through a pile of books A high school memory and reconnected pen-pal Watching Mad Men and requesting long distance poems‌
October Albuquerque, the smell of warm Play-Doh and kitchen stove roasting green chilies There is an almost full moon rising in a cloudless night Sitting low above the mountains Heavy with unseasonal warmth Pieces of a rotator belt at the intersection, a cucumber underneath bike tires, October yellowed leaves in the gutter next to a freshly watered brown lawn Muddied and confused It’s October and in the seventies by mid afternoon In Japan its raining and getting late to be climbing Mount Fuji Oh ladybug soon‌ soon... but please, go slow
Watering the tall green desert grass Watering the tall green desert grass imitation raindrops A thumb and a garden hose A hummingbird from the shelter Of a purple leaf plum Flits through the droplets In the evening sun Seven months and a quarter inch of rain There is a hummingbird playing In the fake rain created By my thumb and a garden hose Watering the green green tall desert grass In my parents backyard Taking shelter in the purple leaf plum From the sun and an Albuquerque afternoon Box turtles eating strawberries In the evening Watching the gardener picking cherry tomatoes flirting with hummingbirds and watering patio morning glories. Wipe down the cast iron skillet with a paper towel Bacons grease and garden fresh zucchini Peaking out the backdoor to catch Finches tilting the hummingbird feeder Spilling sugar water onto dead branches At the base of a lilac bush Instead watch white butterflies circle red cherry pepper plants And a few mid-day clouds carry rain away from the Rio Grande basin North towards Colorado and east towards a never hitting the ground evaporation. __________________________________________________________________ Lee Sanders is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His poems have appeared in several zines and publications including Pretend You Can Reab Audio Zine, Fast Geek Reader and Syntax Magazine.
doug spencer
____________________________________________________________ Doug Spencer is an artist and musician from Denver, Colorado. He plays guitar in Snake Rattle Rattle Snake, deep fries everything in sight and paints with smoke.
dan landes Soul Compost I think I found the lime wedge in the compost I was turning from the gin and tonic I was drinking on the night I really fucked up
Ending the blame game It was not you that killed that part of me it was I that let it die
Near a tree squirrels are funny bees are amazing
To tell the truth I have never enjoyed the sound of your voice speaking of boyfriends past
Hey Kid in the over sized shorts Something about your slack posture gigantic headphones and unlaced shoes tells me you have a pound of weed in your backpack
Fact I do not believe in non fiction
_________________________________________________ Dan Landes is a poet and fiction writer from Denver, Colorado.
Ken Arkind Denver "Don't you ever call this the Midwest! Denver ain't the Midwest, this is the wild west motherfucker!" - Jeanann Verlee
Oct. 24th, 2007 Denver, CO after game 1 against the Red Sox The D&F clock tower on 16th and Lawrence used to be the tallest structure west of new york city. A false idol to legitimacy built by old west mobsters trying bring attention to what was considered by most of the country a train station piss pot before the west coast, Curtis was once called the "street of 10,000 lights" a 6 block used condom of brothels, saloons and strip joints so brightly lit you could always tell how much fun your neighbor had on Saturday judging by the sunburn at Sunday services. Colfax has always been Colfax, an exposed artery in dreams of western expansion, sliced open by the continental divide, when the blood pooled we called it home. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Denver is the city that passed out before last call.
Statistics say we drink twice as much as Boston the proof is in the pavement, if it wasn't for that pesky American revolution we'd have at least a bill's more bodies scraped into the streets, leaving behind the stink of all the wasted tax dollars spent on drunk driving adds. So have your World Series, we never needed a reason to riot beyond our own elevation, some people blame the altitude sickness, but being that much closer to heaven reminds you of how unreachable it actually is, so we smear sins off on steering wheels like wiping our feet on god's door mat. Fuck your gravity. Gravity is nothing but the bottom of god's boot. It's natures most polite form of violence. We know gravity well, live beneath the shadow of the back of it's hand with every hangover. So do not call those mountains, those are not mountains, those are slow motion Gomorrah, those are title waves of stone and tonight the city is drowning, In Lodo, women dressed in their flyest meat hooks, hold their mocha martini drooped profiles in tonight’s question marks, searching for tomorrow's
answers in the form of men who wear shirts that look like insurance companies. Bar Bar pulsing like an epileptic heart-rate glasses breaking like gunshots there's a dog on the pool table the band's too drunk to play and there's more smoke than a Teller County forest fire, but when all the bartenders are under age, who gives a shit. Across town in the Baker district, black scarfed hipsters talk about social network avatars, as though they come from a big town, and the band's not too drunk to play but the club's too crowded to dance, so the kids just set themselves on fire and spread their ashes across the floor. Colfax is still mopping up the blood, and somewhere near the bluebird theatre a woman hollers: "FUCK NO I DON'T DRINK COORS!" While I'm bouncing between bars off 13th Avenue, working on a tomorrow more hung-over than a clothesline, trying my best to forget the smell of somebody's hair her golden curls, sharp and shining, as the wire with which heaven lines its gates. Raising glasses in Denver is a middle finger against natural law. it's a dream picking a fight with fact.
We still live in a cow town but it's full of wolves with hearts that pulse like neon signs, and grins jagged the way eastbound streets ricochet off of Five Points. Our sunshine has been California's biggest cash crop since the gold rush but we've always been better at screaming thin air carries voices well hangs in the wind like a savior. We believe in fire more than prayer, throwing Molotov cocktails at the sky, till we can't tell the difference between flames and stars. We are tossing rocks at chain link fences just to see a spark, we are an unmarked cross standing defiantly on the side of I-70, we are a lit cigarette tossed from St. Christopher's car window. We are still bleeding. We use Gun Club Road as a noose to the hang the memories of our dead friends scream their names from our dust devil lungs into the hollow stone heart of Union Station, then sharpen the pick axes of our teeth on the echo. We are flames engulfing the hills of the west side, the last decade of gentrification ripping away, a fur coat burning across an emaciated spine.
We are drinking whiskey until our throats are warm and rough as the hands of Corky Gonzales. We are the ghost of Don Becker's severed arm sobbing like an abandoned lover, and the cracked laughter of his final joke stumbling through the alleyways of capitol hill like a limping bullet. We are human funeral piers dancing in eulogy watching the register building buckle like an alcoholic's knees beneath the weight of next years lay-offs, as the burning flags blowing atop the brown palace clap in thunderous applause and we run with flaming limbs into the muddy waters of the Platte River, baptizing ourselves again and again, until day breaks like last call. The new light shining upon windows, fractured as a hobo island grin. The streets defeated as a Commerce City sunrise. The shadows of the mountain tops receding into the west, as though god's hand was folding, his fingertips combing the eastern prairies like pack animals, the morning skyline glinting like canines the beasts howling as they go.
5 AM Bike Ride in the snow Larimer St. I am a dirty picture drawn in permanent marker on a dry erase board, a polar bear scratching a claw down it's lovers back. an unnoticed corner of the white house where Nixon wrote his name. I am a boy breaking his first window. a smoking plane that can't seem to crash, the first trickle of blood on a young girls sheets. I am the fastest boy in the world. I am slicing open the belly of a cloud, letting a dark starless night bleed out. I am sketching a chessboard for angels, a scribble on the corner of a math test. I am ice fishing for cigarette butts, I am the worlds worst snowplow. I am drawing the strands of my mother's hair with my tire, onto a world too quiet to tangle them. I am mascara staining a pristine collarbone. a music note, too long and soaring to follow it's sheet music. I am god's sharpie, signing his signature onto my city, as if to say: "See, I made that."
Iggy Pop Walked barefoot out of the trailer park at age 18. Teeth sharpened from gnawing at the leash. A food stamp Adonis covered head to toe in fuck you. He swung his dick at the world and we forgot to duck. Danced the way a pit bull flexes it's neck. you can still hear the rumble of his mating call all the way back to 1969. Anything else that Detroit ever manufactured was merely shrapnel.
Cowboy Poetry In 1993 Routt County decided built itself a new bridge where an old bridge used to be. The old bridge named "Old Cattle Bridge", was used to transport cattle across the Yampa River. In what was originally just a joke name tossed onto the bottom of the ballot The county voted almost unanimously to name the new bridge: "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". The Godfather of soul, just released from a 5 year prison sentence, appeared at the ribbon cutting ceremony. He wore a Caribbean blue suit and a smile white as beached coral. Dancing like he had just bought the copyright to hallelujah he lead the crowd in an acapella rendition of "I Got You (I Feel Good)". The men wearing pearl button shirts And the women in floral print prairie skirts all hummed along like kindergartners learning to recite the star spangled banner. When the song finished Someone shouted "HELL YEAH" and a few men threw their cowboy hats into the air.
Afterwards the crowd dispersed smiling awkwardly at one another looking like teenagers who had lost their virginity together only to realize after the fact they had nothing else to talk about. Later that day Mr. Brown did a radio interview and visited the United Methodist Church on Oak St. where I had been baptized. Then he left on a jet plane like a presidential hopeful on his way to the next campaign stop. That evening at the dinner table my grandmother In a New Jersey accent as thick as her mashed potatoes said "That he seemed like such a nice man, and that she really enjoyed his music." My grandfather nodded in approval. And for the first time in my young life, I had an idea of what it meant to be an American.
Une histoire sensuelle et sans suite. Stiff legged 7 am Crown Heights June raindrops clutch leaves as my sweat pools on your collarbone. Laughter rolls from the bodega across the street as though the city was clearing it's throat. if god made us it is incomplete. It's with the hair that we pull from the devil’s head when the lights are off that sutures our stories. These mornings your breath on my neck is an impact waiting to happen the sheets left twisted like a roadmap we forgot in the trunk. When you leave for work I am a street lamp without its car my body left phantom bent in your absence. _______________________________________________________
Ken Arkind is a National Poetry Slam Champion and full time touring artist. He has been featured in The Documentaries SPIT!, Slamplanet, CBS, NBC and Borders.com's Open Door Poetry series alongside U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He is currently the Project Coordinator for The Denver Minor Disturbance Youth Poetry Slam. He has opened for The Flobots, Gil Scott Heron, Devotchka, Sage Francis and Pulitzer Prize Winner Yusef Komunyaka.
Iris Appelquist Everybody everybody is busy rehashing and rehearsing their perspective reactions to the world and its continually coming apart around them. everybody has their own notions of luck and fate and wrong and right and can tell you or kill you with a cruel certainty of their future victories - as if opponents were easy to find and do battle with. everybody is holding something against someone else, like it was a good exercise or important for their fitness. everybody gets away with as much as they can and hands off the blame as often as they fail in their connivanceembarrassed at the depth of experience unavailable to them. everybody is weighing debts against dodgy bets.
everybody is paying their due as they make their wishes. everybody is enamored of being lied to. everybody is winning. everybody is famous.
mantra
i will not give him my attention. i will not give him my attention. i will not give him my attention. i will not give him my attention. i will not give him my attention. i will not give him my attention.
haiku the lady across the bar is wearing next to nothing. i'd fuck her. i don't take the news seriously, except for the high gas prices. where is it? i don't see the thing you mean, or do i? oh, never mind. i've had enough of this place – i need the nearest suburban strip mall! where people fail, there is always technology never forget that.
_______________________________________________________________ Iris Appelquist didn’t begin in poetry until she reached the usual age of angst whereupon she also began smoking cigarettes and staying out until late at night. Sharing authorship of Blunt Trauma (2009; Spartan Press ) with Jason Ryberg, Appelquist entered into performing art and spoken word as soon as she was of legal age to drink in bars. Her second volume of poetry, titled A Good Cover, is a collection which comments on the human condition will released by Spartan Press.
Vincent Cheap
Mark Hennessey
A Poem to Help End UFO Censorship On the reality-runway-show the beautiful German bird of prey challenges her groundlings to execute a design that says America. Since I like to play a long at home I gather materials: yards of investment bankers buying life-insurance policies from positive bleeders, a sixteen-year-old bolt in a sixty-thousanddollar car texting where are you muddled in her accidental vehicular manslaughter, a foot of crush videos, skeins of smoking rubble unrolling over all the landscape. Night-light pollution creates an opportunity to rename old constellations: the Colon, the Boob&Navel, The Star, the Reverse Period. A million books written an hour in three hundred characters or less—nobody reading nothing. If all the adults were making love the children could play anywhere. I pretend to honor life but my family of mice reunites in the kitchen trash can, goodbyes muffling in the tan plastic shopping bag—the flag of our capricious home—waving to one another through the traps they carry inside themselves. When I burn those pages of books I can remember burn also, like an ex’s kiss. I am a fractal of decreasing magnitude. You like this.
It Was Sad, How Sad? It Was Sad, So Sad, Sad the Day the Great Ship Went Down to the Bottom of the— Husbands and Wives, Little Children Lost Their Lives, Oh It Was Sad the Day the Great Ship Went Down Don’t wanna hear this shit from Rasputina right now, do I? She’s reclined to grant or deny access to her rummy arts. Oh Holy succubus with a well-shaped heel on either side of the veil birth parts, please, please, don’t talk me to death tonight. But my mad prioress demands the respect only true love might prove, rings my bell in small hours to demand polish: an entry wound here, exit there, there are claw marks on the roofs of all our wardrobes underscoring her approbation, divots like the tracks she left in the wisteria patch when she reversed in her armored car, backing over Lucky to shout Au revoir, the corpse of our sins rolled up in the cargo in a stained carpet, a memento headed for the dumpster. Ah, the stolen moments in the midnight salon, you caught by pretend surprise in your bedclothes tiger. How soft the soft parts of you look! Titanic in the grandeur of your swiftly impending tragedy—thin little lights over here, over here going out all about the hole in the water the hull of the sinking ship shaped: soft pocks—one less, one less. Here I try to turn a deaf ear to the background radiation of the cicada, to mooch from her the gift of hot communion. She says no but there’s an edge in her dismissal begging me to throw her over my shoulder, into the Dodge, to delay the demands of appetite only to distance our selves to such remove that our cries will not cadge interruption by the authorities or nosey neighbors or jealous Panda Garden delivery man blushing in what is left of the garden. Icebergs in the North Atlantic call to the skyscraper-sized ice that spins Saturn a ring, together they sing—as even bodies further away from one another do—sing to each other the same sad song—come closer, come closer, everybody walking around
like everything’s all infinite and shit but every particulate we know isn’t. Best I guess to grab our bedraggled playmate by the scruff of her neck, throw her gown in the dryer, give her a hot cup of tea, apply the odd bandage & send her constellation-ward to her destiny, stellar. Common to all.
To the Graduating Class of Melbourne’s All-Girls School 1993 who, after the rock&roll show, after dancing, took me to their Hotel Suite and changed, to a woman, into these gauzy nightgowns and burned in unstable orbits around me communicating untold volumes in gesture expression. You were the most beautiful of manifestations, element by element, of the pulsars winking above the Sydney Opera House.
Pilots/ Zero Tolerance The violence of memory recedes and expands in direct competition with what is imagined—things said yesterday or this morning disappear before lunch— while the clothes we wore as children return again to fashion unimaginably. Somewhere near the thirty-second floor, if the floor you jump from is the eighty-second, having arrived, physically, at this moment through the stairwell window, or fire escape, you get lost in the concrete aspects of the body— but what brought you here has far more to do with memory. Without memory we are as senseless animals, no, that’s not right, animals remember, violence, we are burning bones without memory. Without memory there is no reflection, without reflection there is no sorrow—without sorrow there is no joy. There is no mystery resolved by the body that without memory does not dissolve into cipher. There is no mystery the body cannot solve, nor does not solve in time.
Ground floor.
_____________________________________________________ Mark Hennessey is an artist, poet and the front man of bands PAW and 1950AD. He resides in Lawrence, Kansas and teaches poetry at KU. He has had two books of poetry published: I Lost It All The Night The Day The Circus Came To Town (Spartan Press) and Cue The Bedlam (More Desperate With Longing Than Want Of Air) (Unholy Press). To listen to his bands or check out his books please go to marktomhennessy.com.
Charlythe city mouseFasano CINCO DE MAYO 2012
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