Set a spell by the whispering waters of White Creek
   Park yr rickshaw
        Tie down yr parafoil
             Lower the kickstand on yr Harley
   The views from here look for all the world
             like all the world in God’s Eye, Washington County
   Smell the paint become the smell of the stream
   Dip your eyes in the painted stream
   Cast the lines of your sight like a lure
   Hunker down in a painting
   Plant a crop of possibility
   Reap a harvest of understanding

   Set a spell by the whispering waters of White Creek
   Let the peace of whittled air pull you in
   Take off your roller blades and go barefoot
        Throw the 4 wheel-drive in reverse
             Moor yr kayak to the dam Harry built
   Let the family Orlyk suffuse you, grow
   On you like a burl on a maple. Love
   Sits in the modem like a handshaking aspen,
   An arrowhead that points the direction
   To a future where art is a pinochle pleasure,
   A lasagna of lusty camaraderie
   A place defined simply, everchangingly,
   In how you look at it, in what you see
   In what you throw back, in a word, in a nod

   Set a paella by the whispering waters of White Creek
   Where “Rock On” is carved on the old rocking chair
   Here Donna has staked her claim to the land of the heart
   Mirrored in the green and white shapes of Harry’s art
   There’s nothing these words can give to you
   That your own eyes and ears and feet and teeth
   Didn’t already know was true. So catch the view
   From the Battenkill Rambler
        Leaping from the Rexleigh bridge
             See if yr snowmobile can find
                  Harry’s Special Fields of Summer

   Drop in on The Eyes of Washington County
   Taste the land in the art of the Land of Art: the Art of the Land
   Set a spell by the whispering waters of White Creek
   Rock on Rock on Rock on

   ___________________________________

Centrally Park

   The public bed, a
        shopper’s beach

   Statue river traffic
        turns you into uneasy hero
   Tall saddled, horse cantering
             circles upon circles

   It’s a fast shot of the races
        an all-green urge
             Could you -- why don’t you --
   turn off the TV of the world?

             and sit on this bench beside this stranger
        go on and question, sigh, and fan, linger
   It’s a noise show slow-down
   With an idiot’s boom-box suddenly blossoming

        into a carousel of characters
   My children, my children, step right in
        The zoo is open and the bars in front of you
   Are nothing but the slow shadows of time

             The top level of the tour bus lifts off
        a new Cyclone at Coney
   The Sun turns from Frank O’Hara
        to begin conversing with you

             barreling ahead on skeletal schedule
   With everybody everybody everybody
        Talking to everybody everybody everybody else
             on universal cell phone

        World walking to the beat of
   The symphony of the street love

   ___________________________________

Dancing For Examples

   The moon suspended by a spider web
   Trolling the night sky for comet bites
   We mosquitoes buzzling neighborly
   Into the flesh of the pear

   Doctors of the World

   On the day the World got sick, we called up the doctors
   Emergencies blitzed like fire in a gas factory,
   Tourniquets like washcloths, thermometers like birds
   They rode over the hill a cloud tide, doctors on bicycles
   Sculpting the air to a new earth, those healing hands

   ___________________________________

FIRE AWAY

   No life beauty blots
   Inked eye natal voice
   I’m crying a poem
   Boat of Flight, Hear

   Utter mutter of matterless
   Intensity cracks a subtle dog
   No further arf to bone the dream
   Calling all ears: fire away
   ___________________________________

For Jordy on His Birthday

   In the Era of Paper Cuts to the Soul
   The time when Poetry’s pants fall down
   A stranger at the bar introduces himself
   As the person who will be taking over your job
   Could he call you for some help sometime

   O dear night of clobber
   Won’t the gypsies steal us off right now
   I call your name keeps calling and you come running
   Whichever way you run away is towards
   It’s all right one more time again

   So
   Next time
   You’re confronting the blank screen
   As the Mac is booting up
   Look at the guy staring back at you
   Dead on, and blast him with love

   See, this is a call from the ages, Toots
   You got the phone nailed to ear
   That busy signal is my tongue
   And this language won’t translate
   This being the poem itself
   You can’t hang up and live

   So keep plugging in the quarters
   And dialing till the party answers
   That’s the way it is
   This 29th of January of Now

   ___________________________________

For No One
        for Jim Brodey

   Tompkins Sq sunset
   As gorgeous to take
   As it is to keep     off
   You go ahead, sleep
   I’ll stay up & keep
   The junkies at bay

   ___________________________________

Forget Yesterday

   What never happens,
   Happens. The green bow.
   Mercies. A light rain. Mother
   And stepfather, the job of it. If I
   Could do it all over, the pushing
   Briefly set aside, dusty life.

   The weary world's born all over;
   The jungle rots into sensuous
   Lubricity. A clear path is laid out
   Behind you, and to go that way
   Is to disappear forever. Because

   It's the past. It's the past that never
   Was. It's the unwilling will be. Come
   On baby now, let's go surfing now
   Come a surfin safari with me.

   ___________________________________

Friendship

   First day of fall feels like first day of fall
   Something right with the world standing on ATM line
   West 12th Village morning brittle breeze tiny man in overcoat
   In front of me pivots, remarks
        Be-you-tee-full day
   Day of beauty I allow
   The world in the wind stops for a red light
   Crisp money spits from the machine, hot
   Off the presses, twenties salting the air, taking flight
   Like to visit? he asks, hopeful eyebrows
   I follow his hat up the stairs through the locks
   Cramped musty full of paintings, a golden
   Light that says “Time” infuses his face
   The Hudson swims low in the sun
   We huddle round the samovar he brought from Russia
   Bone china cup “for you” and glass tea for him
   Our faces intermingle in the silver curves
   The tea he serves is the tea in “beautiful”

   ___________________________________

Ginsberg

   The harmonious roar. Words hollowed out for Life to fill
               --Allen Ginsberg

   What calls across?
   The sweet calling itself
   Of course. Words hollowed
   Out for Life to fill

   Brother poet, the Ultimate
   The harmonious roar
   This morning’s delight
   A taste so simple Death

   Cannot intrude. Heavy
   Cadence and a light melody
   Memory fades like sight
   All overtaken by flesh

   ___________________________________

Dream of Allen Ginsberg, Oct 15, 1997, Berlin

   Allen has red hair, I can’t tell if it’s dyed or a wig. We’re sitting in a cozy farmhouse in the Alps, talking and drinking tea, talk talk talk.

   We go out to set up highway cones behind the house in a clearing up the mountain a bit. The highway cones are Uncle Sam hats and American flags.

   Back to the house, more talking. Then, looking up, a Volkswagen van drifts by, banks, lands, using markers as a landing field.

   An older couple gets out, greet Allen warmly. They ignore me, so I slip into the van. The man leans in and says to me, “It’s a boat, too.”

   ___________________________________

HBE97

   A tiny machine swirls the night air
   You can take the fan apart
   You can paint it back together
   Holding brush in mouth, everything
   Goes in the mouth. It’s an old saying,
   You can’t paint with words. I know that
   That is a tree. A gold arbor, a flowing
   River of roots. I know that every year
   Is a starting over. Happy birthday.

   The cats have made it to the bed.
   Our daughter is in high school. Cabs
   Are driving ideas, a right into the heart.
   I will paint the city blue, you will write
   Red poems. In between, a bedfull of life.
   Growing to the tips of leaves, fingers,
   Hands, wrists, arms. The better to hold
   You with. I know that that is a tree.

   ___________________________________

How To Move To Step 2

              --for R Eirik Ott    Keep taking Step 1
   until you forget it’s Step 1

   Die and go to heaven and become an angel and discover
   you’re still alive on Earth and come back to Earth and
   Be Your Own Angel

   Call up Reporter and tell Reporter you’re your dad and your son is giving a poetry reading and demand Reporter should report on this

   Publish your own book and review it anonymously and give it a Rave
   (This is tried and true, this
   is the way Walt Whitman did it)

   Spend at least a year organizing readings and not reading yourself
   Till everyone forgets you are a poet, too
   And then STOP organizing readings completely    And just be a poet

   Just be a poet

   Just be

   A poet

   ___________________________________

Bob Holman for ITP Here

       (for George and Justin)

   Whazza book baby badass boingboing achoo todo?

   Poem read backwards,
                       poem reads you.

   Umbilically connected-to
        s                       t space
         w                    e
            e               e
              e e        e
                 e     e
                   e e
                     whose dust
   are you?

                       Answer the riddle

             in the middle,

   a Rebus RuMbLeGrUmBlE.

   Can cyberjump offscreen?

   Can perfpo cauterize
                  dreams?

                            Bob Holman duh

   Mezzuzah Muzzein

   I will do it
   I have done it
   I am never doing it

   ___________________________________

The Moment of Change Is the Only Poem (Kathy Ryan)

   There’s a secret everybody knows
   The death of a rose

   The whole mishpukkah, the entire Ryan Hanlon Clan and Extended Family, Unincorporated, is gathered in Belvedere living room as in the wake of Joyce’s The Dead, everyone staying up later than The Late Show, later than The Late Late Show, later than later, cracking jokes. Rory begins making them up, so much funnier than the real ones, revealing the skeletal structure of jokes, and everyone worn out sleeps over, Liam and Kamel clutching the basketball, the final jump in their dreams.

   And the sun pours in like a way out,
        peace overtaking exhaustion,
             a flutter rising, a nounless verb

   The Japanese tourist bus circles Twin Peaks, photos to enshrine
        The Foggiest Day of All Time
   The antennae of Twin Peaks, the San Francisco landmark most often
        mistaken for the Golden Gate Bridge
   As tears emerge
   As the coffee grinds
   As the pills start to run out
   Here is to life, May we live forever
   And here is to Kathy, whose lively grace and burning reserve
   Gave love beyond love, joy after joy
        the easy irony of life lived full
             in a life cut short
   Molly and Kelley, stately retrievers of gold
   Buff and Vi, puffballs of guarded concern and a quick retreat
   The eternal Caesar salad, grilled chicken or steak
   The wonderful withering smile
   The cynical surge mothering beauty
   The eternal contradictions’ simplicity
   The family dissonance melody
   She would put up with me
   Toss a pillow, a book, a pill, the whole back deck
   At my head

   See the world as Kathy
   See the world as Kathy did
   Fuck the coffin lid
   Ashes dancing in the wind
   Circle the earth, come home again
   This is not the end

   ___________________________________

THE MOUNT

   Now that Mark Pellington’s first feature, “Going All the Way,” is being released, I can tell some of those behind-the-scenes tales of The United States of Poetry which are guaranteed to incite insight into that most delicious of contempo marriages: Poetry vs. Television.

   many people have asked me if we are getting residuals on some car commercials that use That Thing we used in USOP. That Thing looks like a cross between a viewfinder, bombsight, cowcatcher, and Dr Strangelove’s zero-in precision gauge.

   The Object, which passes muster for most as a piece of technical film apparatus which was left in to show behind-the-scenes scenes.

   In fact, It was invented by Pellington as a means to transition between segments, to show inside outside and vice versa. It is used to roller coaster exhilaration in The Opening sequence to all the shows and throughout Show 1 of The United States of Poetry, although many swear they see it in other places.

   Mark called It: THE MOUNT, and each shoot of our twelve-week road trip would conclude with his announcing, “It’s time for the Mount!” and Tom Krueger would attach the wire frame to the camera and shoot everything all over again. No one but Mark thought the Mount would make it into the shows.

   But it did. In a big way. The Mount creates a very mechanical split screen, calling attention to the whole process of filmmaking that’s going on here. That allows, somehow, for an organic feeling, a truer understanding of how film works with, and over, a poem. In fact, I would say that the Mount implements a filmic translation of the conceit which textile is called Simile and Metaphor.

   Whenever I am asked what The Mount is, I toss the question back -- what do you think it is? After all, naming is part of the poet’s job description, is it not? Here are some of the names people (who are poets) have come up with:

   The Frame
   The Framer
   The Frame Thing
   The TV Thing
   The TV in the TV
   The Muzzle
   The Cowcatcher
   The Hood Ornament
   The Potato Masher
   The Meat Tenderizer

   ___________________________________

Movie Theater Alone You

   May I sit in the middle of the row of your body
   There is no middle nor end
   But the light through plastic that keeps beginning
   Boxcar popcorn, the doctor’s illicit fatale streams
   The giant eyebrow -- air or water?
   Put your arm around time’s fountain, sitting
   With your eyeball galloping all over the place
   Propelling jolt into space, what once was space
   Suddenly funded the Space Program. Many stars.
   A good thing to do for the rest which is deep
   Relaxation exploration OF your life. Oh dear
   +Oh read oh dear oh read
   I am off to the races
   Where the horses ride the humans
   Hold it right there by a noise the end flap flap flap flap

   ___________________________________

MYTHOLOGY 2000

   We eat words. Poetry is spoken, it is the euro of language. Once, a tiny little once. But often, more than likely.

   Hello? Hello? There is no talking. This is a dumb piece of paper with blotto stains and grease lips all over it. Put up or put out. Can the can’t.

   What happens is this: the truth is in the telling, the tasting. Add the salt. Corrupt the pipeline. Art and Industry swagger down the aisle.

   I have been asked to speak to you but my tongue has another opinion. Sex generously disappears. The right is wrong.

   Whenever her fingers slid into the fax machine, Africa would wince with pain. A simple blind. Terror and treachery make a fine breakfast.

   As I was saying, prose. Prostitute Politicos Present: prose. Towards the end of the line, a chunk of prose. It was all prose, except for the rose.

   Freedom is pregnant with democracy’s bastard. All lies, but the poor cannot get to sleep. Steady goes the junk food.

   Brace yourself -- crucifixion sportive. Merciless climate, how the homeless tend to congregate, it’s for more than warmth.

   The slow devolution to reptiles. Music is bought and silence is the price. Meanwhile, there is no meanwhile. This is not the end. This is.    ___________________________________

9:55am July 11 Friday Day #3 Cotati Prairie Sun Visit 2 (for Hal Willner)

   Cold studio, cold enough for the milk to sit out all night.

   It’s 6:25, and we’re still working on Impossible Rap.

   It’s 9:50 and we finished Impossible Rap and we invented Forgotten Melody (The Poet & Peasant Overture).    ___________________________________

Oh those Dreams of Spring 97

   1. Sunny street on the edge of the city
   A poor man, older man of indeterminate race passes in a nondescript fashion
   You wouldn’t notice him, he is shuffling and is a disappeared and is not to be noticed
   Until later you remember him, and see him in a busy low-rent garage, much cool grease and fumes
   In the dirty bathroom, that is where he lives
   Not to speak of it
   Then you go away and come back and the bathroom is gone
   paved over never been there
   Even the hole where the toilet was, just an indistinct variance in the concrete, gone

   2. I have a small part in a play directed by Miguel. Heading into multipurpose room where the company is dressing, this is a one-shot revival of the play. The energy’s high. I am nervous. A buzz I the room, Julio is leaning against a wall, we greet warmly. I start to change into costume, Miguel enters large, camelhair coat over shoulders. he id grand but doesn’t look well, skin sallow, in fact he doesn’t really look lie himself, short kinky dyed red hair. He is holding court and is ceremoniously now going to introduce and toast cast members, I am called up first. I am worried, don’t know what comes next. He begins to be effusive, gesturing around with hands, points towards me, says, “And you won’t even kiss my finger!” Nervous, I try to shrug it off, “I don’t want to kiss your finger!”
Next I am backstage, the show is ready to go on. I am unsure if I should go on, in my little part, after this humiliation, to steal the show, or let Miguel take my part and overblow it, reading from the script. The play is about to begin when I wake up.    ___________________________________

Potato Poem

   Once when I was little I knelt before an onion,
   Dug my arms into the ground up to my elbows
   And prayed for my fists to turn into potatoes.
   The sky was all owls closing in and a sow bug
   Waltzed deftly across my eardrum. It went like
   This: dunde sklittle mouse. A golden melody
   Popped and cascaded, I could not tell inside
   Outside. Tongue, tongue lay there a luscious
   Cucumber. Gasp. No wonder you were surprised,
   As I waited for potatoes, as you paraded
   Past like a typewriter. I was certainly surprised.
   Then the onion opened and inside was a potato.

   ___________________________________

The Questioning Child (for Michael Dorf)

   Write for the little old lady, write for the teeny bopper

   Grragh arr a glll
   Glottal gutteral prespeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech grrrring
   Thoughts spread on the table like harosis
   Laid by each setting a thick napkin of thought
   A thin layer of thought like matzoh
   The shankbone of my throat

   It’s not that I have nothing to say but that I cannot ask
   I want you to ask me to ask you
   Thus are all the questions lain before you like wine
   Except for the question I ask
   That is the question

   What is the answer
   That is the question

   My brother is rebelling
   The roast I am smelling
   My brother’s so smart
   A noodle to the heart
   My brother is so simple
   He lets me pop his pimple

   haggadah maggadah paggadah raggadah
   haggadah maggadah paggadah raggadah
   haggadah maggadah paggadah raggadah
   haggadah maggadah paggadah raggadah

   The words have not been written
   How can I write them
   The words have not been spoken
   How can I ask them
   I am the child who doesn’t even know how to ask
   The words themselves have not been invented
   The invention of words that carry all questions inside of them
   The questions inside the words are more
   Then the questions they add up to ask

   The questions inside the words are more
   Then the questions they add up to ask

   I will stand I will sit I will hunger I will eat
   I will I will I will

   I will the last question I won’t

   ___________________________________

Ron Whitehead and Bob Holman

   A note of deep appreciation emerges from the bell
   Clapper, the diver's helmet bubbling a great gasp
   It is freedom in another land, any other terrain, the sea,
   Say, or the veldt tundra desert cobbled together like streets
   Gathering force to emerge into the central square, Goes.

   Amigo, you put your poetry where the body is
   And let dance skeletal fragments of possibility
   Whose smoke drifts over the dykes, a soft pause
   With pure intent and a blessing on a slice of thick
   Brown bread. I can't remember when, but I can

   Imagine. The world retraces evolution, the fish ponder
   And the whole green algaeful glories of existence fin
   A book as the bucket turns over on the world. To return
   The favor is to mesh the go with the go on. Look you
   In the eye and trade gill flutters. Write the poem.

   And so now home Kentucky, New York, a kindly ink
   Pen of nomenclature to suggest a new society -- ah,
   The souls of worms, and a late-nite dance craze. The life
   Of the mind won't let up -- because you's why! Now we're
   The bubbles, disappearing into air nouveau. What a trip

   To rip the mask from skull and wail into the tooth of crime.
   I wouldn't-a missed it for a laugh a second -- all the plates
   Rattle, and there's noting left but juggling gravity and death.
   That's ok too -- long as I'm with you. Friendship as fall settles,
   And winter's thought stokes the spring. Brilliant brilliant. All all.

   ___________________________________

A Sense of What Is left

   It’s spring again
   I wonder why
        --Schuyler

   Inside my mouth, a moth
   I am a giant reading through a tiny magnifying glass
   Washing the color in -- they call me Big Ted
   Relicking not a light frond, Why did
        the pigeon apply for a passport
   Seen through the hole of Russian literature
   The bolt rolls into the building the building builds
   I will eat my desk, for that is
   The poet’s work

   On my left handside is the evergracious diligent spellmaker
   Adorned in black shroudathon
   This backwash is where age smells happy,
        animates my anathema

   To my right, the wrong, where I have been
   Ah friends once, how old the enemy gains on the baccarat table
   Like the fat of middle years

   In deep morning, the yoga of love doth headstand the light
   I am a moving target of recapitulation, a song
   Listening to infant’s breath, where the infant is time
   as ever a quiet piano, a loud fort, and the sanity that lifts
   To reveal the stuttering of tongue frazzle towards a new language of engagement.

   Strut yourself up a stage, Partner
   The delicious apple appears on everyone’s plate
   It’s the crazy corner where everyone meets
   Sing hey lonny lonny
   Sing hey to the music
   Sing say and do it all day
   Never forget spring’s suicidal hope forks infernal
   Spear me tender in the throat

   ___________________________________

Sentence(s)

   I bow in all your directions simultaneously like the sun.
   Will respond more fully when the moon rises and I can read the book
   ___________________________________

Simultaneously Here and Gone (Clifford Brown)

   Clifford Brown strings saturated 50s everlasting
   Brown sounds blue when lip lift caresses air
   I may not be here long or longer there but longest I
   For muted morning’s eternal flutter, singular
   New Eurekan takeout container. All the news
   None of the time, lipstick shimmers, peace confides
   I’m a pear and the gentle persuasion of being
   Collects memory’s lint, fragmental tone fringe. Stop
   Mr Clifford Brown on Love’s Death Tone
   In the sea of words lifeboat strung holds
   It all together, the O in SOS, melody sun
   Open like an eye.

   ___________________________________

Slammer (cont’d)

             Dear Queen of Poetry,

   This is just to say
   Through the swirl
   You're my girl
   And no matter
   Where we fly
   I am yr guy

   The story of your detective 3rd eye
   Yr handicuffs
   Yr visionary sleuthing
   Is one of the greats I expect to read about it in next Channels

   Also, I am not surprised

   I love you, and it is hard
   To even breathe sometimes
   But this love is a big part
   Of just going on
   And
   On

   Love in a basket
   Holding the world
   In a word,

   Controversy (& Poetry) Reign as Mouth Almighty
   Wins National Slam Championship
   Da Boogey Man Becomes First Male Slam Champ

   (Aug. 10: Middletown CT) In a series of poetry slams marked by official protests and concluding with boos mixed with thunderous applause, Mouth Almighty came back from a semifinal defeat to Chicago to win the 8th National Poetry Slam held in the huge Freeman Auditorium before 900 screaming poetry lovers. The scores of the Finals looked like this: Mouth Almighty: Mouth Almighty 115, Chicago 110, Cleveland 109.8, Worcester 105.85.

   The protests were both lodged against Mouth Almighty, a team of New York City all-stars; both were disallowed. They pointed, however, to a deep concern in the Slam Family about corporate sponsorship (Mouth Almighty is the world's first major poetry label), as well as to the all-star nature of the team: Regie Cabico, Evert Eden, Taylor Mali, Beau Sia, with Bob Holman as coach. "This begins the era of the Super Team!" shouted an ecstatic Cabico, whose coming out to Mom poem, performed as a duet Mali, was the evening's final and highest scoring poem.

   In the Individual Slam, Da Boogey Man, stalwart of the Cleveland team which was undefeated going into the Finals, read two powerful, slow-paced poems which resonated strongly in the air hanger fieldhouse. Patricia Smith, who along with Slam Founder Marc Smith was hosting the Individual Finals, announced that this was the first time in the history of Slam that a man had won the prize. DJ Renegade of Washington, DC finished second for the third year in a row, with Glenis Redmond-Sherer of Greenville, NC, taking third.    ___________________________________

SLIDE

   Rita Hayworth’s tongue in a cup of tea
   This is a dialogical plot, to cross
   Fag with dyke in a mood reminiscent
   Of of, as in chiffon, the shift is on

   If you can say transgress while transgressing
   You may hold my hole gainst your hole
   Emitting symphonics, entering oscillators
   Discovering the purpose of panty is to rub it in

   Let’s imagine play and power up
   The rough cunt edge of soft cock
   I will if you will and I will first no let’s
   Do it together whether a feather would rather

   Be plucked than tickle the tender torture
   I want fuck want and where there’s a will
   There’s a dead comer, a rocked transference
   A tiny satin bow at front

   *

   Linger lingerie as alien eyes
   Whose eyes these are I think I’d rather not know
   Si, yo tambien
   I mean I want it to
   To what all over again you

   Flicker nipple, do we not share a tongue
   As in the language of love
   As in in

   The cost
   The horrible cost of skin the price
   Of asking the covering the condomization
   The juicy lesbian sweeps memory as the gay man
   Was entered as in fast as in dental dam as in the shared hair
   Of air

   *

   A kind of color
   The body is what remembers
   The forgotten mind whips a consecration round
   Birthing heat via light or was it the reverse
   As she did him as he flipped over
   Revealing his cunt and begging for it
   She gave it back to him

   *

   What would you say without your tongue
   Its sex lying there a cucumber of ridiculous
   Radiance, how sensate the tiny whorls
   Of your fingerprints pressing loop by loop
   Around our mutual throat
   As my vagina, the life of blood

   In can’t presuppose the pouch of touch
   The punctuation of taste and the unthinkable
   Which when remembered becomes the everyday
   Longing for lick and tell

   ___________________________________

Tie My Shoes

   I bow and bend
   to tie
        my shoes

   May I tie yours
   together
        with mine

   under the bed

   I wondered where.

   ___________________________________

Watching Slingblade with Bill and Sara

   First say what will happen
   Then see what happens
   Then comment on what happened
   Build better movie, directed in air, among friends
   Pushing characters into holes, orbits they could never
   Until sudden collision of our movie and the movie
   Sara

   Rushing round warily hummingbirdily in
   Order to miss all the scary parts
   Bill and I, we have our feet up on sofas
   The actors are good even when they don’t follow our directions
   Suddenly look in the camera
   They like what we have to say and want to discuss it
   Cut, bring Sara up to date what happened while she was out
   The scary parts lie in the shadow of words
   Roomful of words littered with words
   Flit back to the children’s rooms, Ruthie and Sam,
   Who is protecting who as Carl in movie
   Protects all children, back home in our own asylums
   Our own movies rolling on in our own sleep
   Everybody else sleeps too, goodnight!
   Thanks you for writing this movie among friends

   ___________________________________

WebSter’s All New Collegiate NetZine Poetry ManifeStationary!!

   I proclaim no I!
   Language itself weaves the Web, proclaim exclam Blam
   Some new thing this Net itself is righting
   The sinking world, what drain are we spinning
   Alice’s rabbit hole direct to Plato’s cave
   Down into up onto over into into into
   I am a mighty orange buffalo
   “This screen!” everybody screams, “is the cave wall!”

   Plunk plunk plunk
   Spelunk locution echoes
   Text text text
   It is your text your text your text your
   To alter on the altar of whatever you tink
   Tinker with the Thinker
   Add a single note -- Change the symphony
   Now, it is your symphony
   Too much passivity makes the Doodles bag empty
   Sympathy for the empty throwaway
   Honey, the peach salsa has green on it
   The cat food from the snaptop can has green on it
   The boxed silken tofu has green all over it
   The Compaq Presario is covered
   With moss and seaweed, creepy kudzu
   Mold mold mold
   My olde My olde My olde
   Why hast thou repetified amplified blown all out
   The authorship question authority lurches to the podium
   As the words themselves begin dancing
   Cavort consort retort blurt love jitter twirl pas de pourquoi pas
   A social circle of dancing to eat the fears of the cannot communicate
   ‘Deeper into the It of It
   I cannot sit’

   Ahem    Readers, Write!
   Writers, Read!

   The gorgeous thing, the fantastic rainbow of tears
   The magnificent library
   The archbishop of rock
   The quick response
   The ultimate repose
   The question of answers
   The who should be in the band that kind of day
   When the brutal winds of technology blotted all with green moss...
   (We have been there with that mold thing backaways, boss --
   --Ah, but this is the buildup to ze Grande Finale,
   You crazy youth! You freefall!)

   Where the jangling ganglia play and the fly rumors roam
   Where hirstory is something you make up as you make up

   What is important to remember is respect
   Respect respect
   If we do not respect respect what will we respect
   Loyalty?

   That is a good rockin answer to a wake me quick survey
   Happenstance leads to questionnaire
   I was admiring the peaches as they became pears
   Threading water: The slow erosion of the tendency to dichotomize

   I am separating my soul out to get it interviewed by the Search Committee

   Hey there, you
   Will you be there, will you join the Committee?
   To analyze the DNA of my hair
   Via your Website?
   Glottal imprecations threading water?
   And a buzz bomb?

   Your words are in the crow’s nest
   Land, No! Land, No!
   We will never land, we are liquid flow
   The seas connect at 28.8bps, and the tides
   Bring the moon to the bay

   All language waits utter your activation
   Jumpstart languid possibilities fusing fusion
   With play, an explosion in mind
   A fullbody wake-up call from your sleeping lover’s dream
   The beat of the message in the modem’s handshake
   The screen’s scream
   I am mighty orange buffalo

   ___________________________________

Whitman Cab Ride

   Hullo, this is Walt, Walt Whitman,
   prodding you to cinch down your waistcoats
   as this old buggy rolls. Strap down for poetry, O
   Brothers, O Sisters! Together let us thread our way
   through the heart of the Empire, shake out the shaggy
   gray hair of Brooklyn, head of Long Island, and do it
   all as safely as these times allow. I am with you
   in this Queens language taxi, a dot of yellow
   sailing 5th with a Mondrian beat. And don’t forget
   to pick up your receipt, conveying a record
   of your most personal memories of this joyous
   ride’s occasion, turning like a corner into this poem.

   To all of you,
   The New, the same old New
   of our fair city’s views.
   This has been Walt Whitman --
   for I like you have walked these streets and avenues.
   Which way to the Brooklyn Ferry?

   ___________________________________

Poems for “Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (Ralph Lee)

   I. Woman poised mid-fall/changing falling freeze positions

   Set fire to water
   Silence sound
   All fall up and
   All fall down   

   Down falls up
   Up falls down
   Fire waters birth
   As earth/Is found

   Where do you land//
   When there’s no land/
   Where do you land//
   When there’s no land/
   Where do you land//
   When there’s no land/
   (repeat, faster and faster, everyone drumming)
   (abrupt stop/all freeze but Woman)

   Set fire to water
   Silence sound
   All fall up and
   All fall down

   Down falls up
   Up falls down
   Fire waters birth
   As earth/Is found

   II. Falling Reprise: either “Where do you land,” or verses, or all

   III. Beaver/Otter/Muskrat Trio

   Beaver: I’m a diver
   True survivor
   I won’t leave her
   Call me Beaver

   Sound of thunder
   It’s a wonder
   Goin under
   Under under
   [Others join] Under under under (down) under (down) ...
   [“Under” becomes “Down” as Storyteller speaks over]

   Storyteller:   Beaver! We believe her! But still there’s no reason for you to go
             so low, so slow and slower -- [chant slows] to the unreachable               bottom!

        Otter:          Take what ya bought’er
   Give to the otter
   Like ya aughter
   Like she’s yr daughter

   Sound of thunder
   It’s a wonder
   Goin under
   Under under
   [Others join] Under under under (down) under (down) ...
   [“Under” becomes “Down” as Storyteller speaks over]

   Storyteller:   O Mad Otter! Your lungs are tiny bags of hope! Alas, tiny
             Mammal -- it takes more than hope to build a world. [chant
             slows] You need the dirt -- and Otter cannot reach bottom.

        Muskrat:   Muskrat packrat ticktack hold that!
   Relax
   Muckracks make tracks clickclacks syntax
   Relax
   No cracks wisecracks smokestacks muskrats
   All that won’t hold back my RELAX muskrat

   All:          Hollerin [loud] HOOOO (who?)
             Hollerin [whisper] hoooooo

   Storyteller:   Muskrat swims like the earth to reach the earth under the
             earth. Muskrat fills lungs with determination and ease, sweet
             air of courage, strength of conviction, blind trust of love. A mighty serenity kick all the way below under under, to the mud of possibility!

   IV. Sapling Traveling Song

   Distance is another place to be
   The going there will set you free
   There is no there/I’m always here/I am
   Distance is another place to be   

   Distance is a wind it has a mind like a clock
   Legs and roots connect a poem is a walk
   Fro-zen Mo-tion Fro-zen O-cean
   Rock to rock to rock I travel on

   Distance is another place to be
   The going there will set you free
   There is no there/I’m always here/I am
   Distance is another place to be

   V. Canoeing Into Dawn (Sky Lake)

   Sky Lake
   Ride upon the waters
   Sun Bubble
   Wave across the ripples
   Land Butter
   Can the crazy chatter
   Mix the morning batter
   Make the matter matter
   Here we go!

   Rude folks
   Keep the paddle steady
   Killin jokes
   Roll the dice already
   Egg yolks
   Bonus toast for breakfast
   Tender moon in Memphis
   Do you think I need a haircut?
   It’s your turn to paddle for a while

   VI. Sun Appears on Turtle Island

   Night was cold
   Night was long
   Only thing warm
   Was my song
   And I forgot the words
   Couldn’t remember the words

   Mountains tall
   Mountains deep
   Night unending
   But I couldn’t sleep
   Cause I forgot the words
   Couldn’t remember the words

   Woke up this morning
   The very first morning
   The word is sun
   The day’s begun
   If I could hum (hmmmmmmm)
   I’d hum the sun (mmmmmmmmm)

   What you see
   Is home to me
   Light is light
   The sun sets free
   Like a fluttering bird
   That is the word

   Lighter than light
   Weighs nothing much
   Kiss of the sun
   The slightest touch
   You say “Touch”
   I say “Thanks so much”

   Now I got the words
   I’ll sing all day
   Now that there’s day
   I’ll find my way
   Whaddaya know
   Whaddaya say

   VII. Sapling Effervescent, Hodu’i Makes It Up As He Goes Along

   Water’s falling
   Sky is grieving
   Grass has blades
   The trees are leaving

   What makes a tree a tree
   As far as I can see
   It’s me
   It’s me, and what you be-leave

   Mountains flowers
   Sweet night air
   Suddenly the world is everywhere
   I’d say share as in everywhere

   What do you think
   What do you know
   Everywhere you are
   There’s a place to go

   Shoulda stayed home
   And watched TV
   Instead of creating
   Reality

   I may be a myth
   But how bout you
   Inventing a world
   Is a worn out shoe

   Nothin to say
   So let silence say it
   Give away the water and the lands
   To the dead giveaway
   Of your hands

   A short comedic (hope-a hope-a) Sapling Effervescent, Hodu’i Makes It Up As He Goes Along

   Sapling:     I walk in Beauty as the night
   Hodu’i: Arwf! He can see what’s outta sight!?
             Articus Smarticus, el Senor!

   Sapling:     It all fits together so nicely
             The trees sigh in pulchritude -- I made thee, O Tree!
   Hodu’i:     Brawk brawk -- Poultry? Awrf! Poetry?
             What does he see?
             Mercy-percy-tercy BORing

   Sapling:     The rush of air, the rustle of grass
             The sky is a bowl on turtle’s back...
   Hodu’i:     And I am the Great Cornholio!

   ___________________________________

Xtreme Poems

   Invoke the Invocation

   The thrill frill
   The swirl girl
   No thank you

   The pink bouquet
   Let’s play croquet
   No thank you

   The world is a mountain
   I’ll make the top
   I’d like to talk
   But my climb won’t stop
   So thank you
   No thank you

   1. Braver, Newer World

   Ran out the door this morning
   Into a new world
   Not that I left my family behind
   (I could still hear my sister)
   But the driveway was a flowing sheet of gold
   And the mailbox a proud old woman
   Who smiled a certain smile
   And said something I’ll never forget
   In a language I did not know
   And I could feel the world spinning,
   Could feel its roundness,
   A sweet, white twirling leather ball
   And then I heard the woman’s voice
   And I understood “There is a world,”
   She said, “Under this world”
   I know, I said
   “That’s where I live,” I said
   And when I walked back in the house
   My sister smiled a certain smile

   [var.]
   Ran out the door this morning into a new world
   Not that I left my family behind (I could
   still hear my sister). But the driveway was
   A flowing sheet of gold, and the mailbox,
   A proud old woman who smiled a certain smile,
   And said something I’ll never forget
   In a language I did not know.
   And I could feel the world spinning,
   Could feel its roundness, a sweet white
   Twirling leather ball. And then I heard
   The woman’s voice, “There is a world,”
   She said, “under this world.” I know, I said,
   That’s where I live. When I walked back
   In the house my sister was smiling a certain smile.

   2. Queen Scene (Gimme That Ball!)
   Gimme that gimme that gimme that ball
   Flicker pass rockin past -- pause -- stall
   Gotta roll over defense gotta fly gotta soar
   Buckle down the whole town -- gimme that! I gotta score
   Thwack -- the indefensible gender snaps
   I’m four feet on the ground -- I’m the sound of the sound
   I’m a motion goddess dripped in blur -- I’m whatcha wish you were
   I’m a word - you say which, you behind me
   Gimme that ball -- you never find me
   I morph into the net itself -- never comin down
   I’m queen scene no machine ain’t no dream -- my crown

   3. Q: What Do You Think About During the Skijump?

   Sometimes in the silence
   Where the wind is speed
   I hear a chorus of grandmothers
   So real they become a body
   A presence beside me
   And then it’s like I’m inside
   In that body, inside like a womb
   And my mother is inside
   Her mother, my children
   Inside me. We’re flying the world
   Like a plane planet, the fluid
   Of the air buoys us -- flying on
   Sounds ethereal and lifting
   Voice body pure sensation
   And folks when I land
   That’s what makes the land land
   With a crashing burst of birth
   And the knowledge that I am first

   4. Ice Attack Comeback

   Girl slice
   Tough dice
   Black rice
   Ice

   Hot stick
   Cold kick
   Clock click
   Twice

   Not nice
   Not sweet
   Now grind
   Yr teeth

   Better mind the weather whether yr in the boy or girl zone
   Got half the world cheerin’ for me -- yr all alone
   C’mon atone with the Princess of power
   You’ve outgrown the king’s final hour
   So pick up yr stick ‘n let’s go
   Skate onto the ice nice ‘n slow

   Girl slice
   Tough dice
   Black rice
   Ice

   Hot stick
   Cold kick
   Clock click
   Twice

   Not nice
   Not sweet
   Now grind
   Yr teeth

   The points not the point
   The goal’s not the goal
   We got more on our minds
   Than evening the score

   Take the pill, Bill
   Ya gonna grieve, Steve
   Gonna win, Ben
   It’s the bomb, Tom

   Not nice
   Not sweet
   Now grind
   Yr teeth

   Hot stick
   Cold kick
   Clock click
   Twice

   Black rice
   Tough dice
   Girl slice
   Ice

   ___________________________________

Yawn

        Good Morning

   Put hat over yawn
   To make it dawn