200! (Dog Talk)


200! the old mutt says
hallelujah and forevermore
the rats of us
keep banging on that drum
if the sky has his way
if the shy sky has his way
frank o’hara blessed me
early in my career — he blurbed
my christening i’ll pray for you
says the well intentioned divorcee
really where would we be without soft
scrub the bathroom would be the barn
no other poet should mention prokofieff
you’re setting yourself up for failure
it’s like last tuesday when the martians arrived
and locked all the inmates in with the guards
and burnt the whole penal colony
for fuel — i know it’s cruel. you’re not
telling yourself anything you don’t know
he blurbed my christening he read radio
but spelled it the old russian way
i remember something now about my grandfather
but can’t find a reason to type it — i’m not
the showboat All week long I trudge fatiguingly
i couldn’t name a damn thing the inanity of it
would crush me like a slug beneath a heel
in hell he made me come close i’m in
no condition a man is a man is a man
we think we can do anything and then
anything comes face to face with self-recognition
and the whole national book awards go ka-boom
how do i get out of this
promise me you’ll find a scholarly way to shuffle off
how? i listened and i didn’t like what i heard
another bug in another field of heads unrecognizable
except for it turns around — means of rotation
unknown — and shouts backwards into his
spinal column: 200! bark bark rough rough etc etc
and out of the eye’s corner a dune buggy
accelerating cliche-first into the azzurri sunset

The Ruins

Wikipedia Poem, No. 921

the ruins third way scan and destroy poetry image 2019 c wikipoem.org and joseph m. gerace

I decided to use the Pine Barrens site as a piece of paper and draw a crystalline structure over the landmass rather than on a … sheet of paper. In this way I was applying my conceptual thinking directly to the disruption of the site over an area of several miles. So you might say that my non-site was a three dimensional map of the site.

Robert Smithson

Buca il geranio la maceria, rissa

Maria Luisa Spaziani

but only you
love sheds on you love
sheds on you love
shed on you

abuse
faith
this dog you love
sheds on you
love shed on you

hearth nebulous
parallax hearth

&yet
diagnostic dark
drinking dark
drinking
dranking
drunnc

always night
always night
always night &yet

death queer hearth
nebulous health
nebulous hearth &yet

again
night of the long commercial
night always drinking night & shhh upon
rigid compass shhh abstract shhh

How To Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms

Wikipedia Poem, No. 688

htgpm

After James Schuyler

the daffodils that hammer
iron outside all day daff
odils that poem any
way they hammer iron what’s
that wolf say my governor
oh for someone like me i
speak to talk a small speck to
me i bark back at st francis
poem hammering iron
outside the window what’s this
that they iron outside in
the street i presume it is
the street and what of that fierce
hum that comes like a poem
through the unhealthy hatch the
ill hatch the daffodils cried

Poet’s Market 2018

Wikipedia Poem, No. 682

w682
“Maybe you have to be from there to hear it sing” C.D. Wright

 

a bell 
long ago 
rung in fear
     
one with 
a thousand 
jumps 

a great poem can be 
wild nectar or a great poem 
can be scrubbed from the timeline

                        from 
by whom?                his moaning
                        to be 

how      i assume 
you didn't choose what 
you'd surreptitiously strike

one perfect choice what'd you 
have to not say
          about the young plants 

the end   so wild
      so abandoned of cherry blossom 
not the wild plants with a thousand-word long line 

and this morning i'm unable 
to plant anything lovely 
a cypher as if long ago the bell was rung 

in a dark mossy room 
ducks in marshland jump 
into the air and crash

a great poem can be removed with buck
and jump a great poetry book should be 
wild never hit one perfect cherry blossom 

if by cherry blossom you mean sells well
every day i taste a man my poem 
can be how it is assumed	you'd never

choose what you'd never hit one 
perfect choice nectar of the therapist 
the tended-to plants present wild nectar 

with both hands a great poem removed from 
morning is not a therapist is not a plant lovely
his dog kills the therapist his morning 
     
is lovely and romantic 
and his morning is not the wild nectar 
on the thousand turning silent eyes

so 
there is loveliness and fun 
the therapist and the therapist's dog 

kill ducks in marshland
a great poem can be 
removed by scrubbing

from mourning 
i'm unable to choose 
what you'd nectar on o reader

a great poem can be removed 
from the whiteness of the bath
is not led into a thing 
     
i'm unable to recall the wild never
the title of a long 
ago rung bell afraid 

one perfect choice what 
you'd nectar on a great poem can be 
how wild plants are lovely without us

and buck (he says you didn't choose) 
on a great poem can be removed 
and planted in the garden beside his body 

i wonder 
is there not a therapist 
inside every ridiculous yes

Poem

now outside are scary things
out there children play
other bells ring out then
cease with mouths and thin skin
everything with clout is immediate and
blood waits for a bout below layers of paper

my dog watches a goldfinch
with her nose she cries
and whines complains
or does not understand the screen
a hinge creaks between
her wet nose in here and her memory
of sprinting
of the dry grass
on her brown back
of the unexpected
pizza crust she looks into me

with the excited eyes of a middle-aged
woman who in 2017 bravely enrolls
in an online poetry course
the TA refuses to insist
Frank O’Hara’s Personal Poem
has nothing to do with her
racial hangups he lost

his sobriety and everything
is unshakably out of control.

Wikipedia Poem, No. 187

oil
“There on the hillside a large herd of pigs was feeding. So the demons begged Jesus to let them enter the pigs, and He permitted them. Then the demons came out of the man and went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.” Matthew 8

 

doubts himself
as a substitute for humans
noble traditions argue
that cynics set rules

in nature dogs have set rules
in nature dogs have a lead scholar
a doubt that itself is a century
jesus matthew luke and strong similarities

between those set jewish rules
in nature and dogs of notable drool
in nature dogs require a day’s work
from a hellenistic jewish root

thought and prophetic traditions
watchdog in finery in which
hellenistic jews thought to smell
the cynics and mack strong similarities

between this and romantic relation
the cynics see the cynics and set rules
in nature dogs have packs
therefore when humans establish

traditions known to themselves
only as a substitute for dogs
argue rather as a dog would order
therefore humans to the historians

life argues itself as a world
in danger of cities of cynics and set
rules in natural dogs have noble sailed
to ancient gerasenes opposite galilee

Wikipedia Poem, No. 179

trimboko
“four hundred years of ship-spread / jihad at first called / the Thirty Years War / buff coats and ships’ cannon / the Christian civil war / of worldwide estrangement” Les Murray

 

brothel
or doggerel
brothel wherever more

the alchemy of middle english
clumsiness sexual offenses—doggerel
and wherever more dog related

doggerel promises
as bad poetry as
unkempt premises

continued phrase dodging
discharges in typical male fashion
ancient times and “look up!”

dog killer like
middle english clumsiness
or the banal differences

of dice games
goods and services
a sixteenth century demigod

old church
slang imprisonment
for the offense