words you can taste

at the supermarket sighted among the rib eye steaks 

& rump roasts is cow tongue

on a blue platter made of styrofoam 

wrapped in plastic

one among several cow tongues that appear

to await the marvel & caress 

of the eaters who call this a delicacy

a cut of meat above 

cuts of meat but i recall my mother

buying & preparing tongue

because we were the working poor

& it was cheap

& me as a child thought it a kind 

of miracle to eat

a thing that can if you grant the conceit

taste you as you 

tasted it & so i would make up words

a language meant for 

cows to hear me explain my eating

of their tongue

the sounds of it making no

sense in english

words that betrayed my innocence 

& stupidity

but could of course speak cow

& have cow speak me

i remember

hot summer nights at the drive-in

like the long defunct Mather Auto Movies

where i saw movies like American Graffiti [1973]

& bruce lee in The Way of the Dragon [1972]

sometimes i'd be bored & asked my parents

if i could go outside & play in the playground

they could keep an eye on me & my brothers 

because the playground was right beneath the screen

& on those hot summer nights we would go to the snack bar

for treats & soda i loved the sound of my sneakers 

crunching the hard gravel of the car lot & the doppler

effect of the soundtrack from each tinny speaker on each car

but it was that time i walked back with my father from the snack bar

when the door was open to the projection booth located smack in the center 

of the drive-in because it was a very hot night & i saw it i swear

the projectionist sat in an oversized over-stuffed la-z-boy recliner

an old man with a pot belly & thick glasses resting on the bridge of his nose

reading a fat paperback while the cartoons were spooling on the projector

& as i gazed inside of the mystery of the movies i knew right then

what i wanted to do with my life

a favorite poet

wild turkey haiku

turn the corner on american river dr

3 toms encircle the streetlight

agentes secretos de la noche

plans upon plans  

it came from the trailer park!

just saw this documentary with b. at the Crest Theater & am totally stoked!  many of the ol' skool skaters were in the audience including producers tony alva [a la dogtown & the z-boys fame] & sac's own, actor/comedian brian posehn [that dude is tall!]  great to see my city & it's underground skate scene well-represented!  peace!

unbalanced day

 a.m.

knocked back by a car driving in reverse

+

p.m.

attacked on the street by a street person's dog

=

keeps you on your toes

key west bookshop haiku

among exploded light from the storm 

the novels of

jim harrison

bot un-bot

my regular readership of this place in the pixels usually hovers around less than 100.  i am grateful to get that many readers & i am humble that readers will take a few moments out of their busy lives to read my posts.  but today, & a few days ago, the number of readers spiked to well over a thousand.  at first i'm flattered as hell.  but looking at the posts that readers clicked on stretched back to 2005.  & they were random too.  no themes.  it's possible that there are readers, or reader, like me, that will stick around the blog of a writer & go deep into their archives.  i do that a lot.  but it might be a bot that is scouring the web for, well, i don't know.  as much as i follow tech news & developments, & even as long as i've been blogging, i'm still pretty much a beginner at them.  but having one of my posts 'unpublished' from 2004 because it violated Blogger's TOS makes me go, huh.  bots do scour the interwebs.  they are also used to skew the numbers of clicks & attempt to drive traffic.  i should think that me being a small-press antipoet is of such little concern even to Skynet that john connor wouldn't give a shit.  still, this is a little weird.  not that i'm a little paranoid.  but then as the paranoid say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are not out there.  so who the fuck knows.  as i've said in a recent post about the influence of DIY punk ethos/aesthetics on my living & thinking one of the reasons why i continue to blog even if blogging is no longer the hip thing to do is that blogging allows me to self-publish.  it gives me the tools that allow me to do my own thing.  we live in a digital age/world.  publishing online is where i can practice the art as cavafy practiced poetry, or how punk rockers recorded, pressed & distributed their music & zines.  so c'mon, bots!  i am not john connor.  break me a give.  & as for all you all.  thank you for stopping by!  i really, really appreciate you!

published to unpublished

i got an email this evening from the Blogger Team notifying me that one of my posts from 2004 was unpublished because it violated blogger's TOS  

i didn't title my pieces at that time & i have no idea what the post was about & since it was nearly a 20 year old piece of writing i will probably never know what the post was about & how it offended the TOS

at first i thought this was a spam email until i logged on tonight & saw the notice in my dashboard

then, i recalled my friend alex gildzen writing about the same situation that happened to him

http://arroyochamisa.blogspot.com/2023/03/strange.html

like alex said about his own blog my place in the pixels has a relatively small readership

i'm grateful to have a readership at all considering that i'm a small press poet of no renown obsessed with horror/exploitation movies sex desire life poetry family friendship etc etc.

& i can't recall any of my writings that could piss off the algorithms of our fair digital cultures

unless you consider cuss words that are abundant in my writings & in the early days of this blog i was writing a lot about wild exploitation movies

like beckett sez i can't go on i'll go on

keeping on keeping on

i am grateful to have this space for my poems reviews essays & rants 

& i am very grateful to have you too along for this wild ride into movies living & the international republic of [anti]poetry