bad poems

i have written many bad poems

i expect to write many many more bad poems before i am thru & can't do it no more

either because i died or incapacitated somehow 

like a stroke or something but then i think of old whitman living in his splendid squalor in camden, nj where he suffered several strokes & was still the great good grey poet

it is said that whitman's house was so messy with his papers everywhere it was an astonishing thing to experience & yet the poet was able to extract the exact item he needed when he needed it

great feats of whitmanic bravura he made his life into a poem

still, i am committed to my own minor domestic bohemia & i pledge to stay the course in writing bad poems

my only criteria are to not be boring or dull but create a poetics like a punk rock guitar solo where the damn notes go screechy & yet stay within the song & as another song goes lend me your ear & i'll sing you a song but i will most likely sing out of key

being the old punk i am odi et amo until all the goddamn wheels fall off

i will write bad poems

where the streets are paved with poems

 

quote unquote

 life in poetry

it's not what you say as a poet, it's how you live as a poet.

-tom clark

being a poet is not writing a poem but finding a new way to live.

-paul lafleur [thru eileen r. tabios]

i'm in deep

 

infra baudelaire

 

street poetics

 

landward ho!

 

sunset spring

 

dream diary

 what the hell do i make of this one

i arranged an interview with mike ness of social d except that he parried my attempts to meet so i found my self in a park with anna waiting for mike to appear he avoided our meet date & time & sent in his place a VHS tape of a local Sac band that had been grooving on i watched the tape & agreed that the band whose name escaped me now was kickass but still anna & i waited for mike in a public park 

when i saw me yes me across the park walking toward who knows what the me across the park looked at us & smiled as if he were caught in some clandestine affair 

when he reached the trees he was gone from sight

i know you saw that i said to anna to which she answered yes i did

so then i saw me myself in a public park we saw me across the way in a public park waiting for mike ness so i can interview the punk rocker

& i don't which me is writing this right now

stagediving

it is when you find yourself onstage

perhaps next to the guitarist

or the singer 

the marshall stacks like a brick wall behind you

& the crowd below stage

dilates into a single eye

such movement

beyond sound or dance

but a dance within dance

where you go

off the proscenium 

like crossing the event horizon

of a black hole

into the singularity 

my first punk rock show