Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork

A couple weeks ago S. and I hit the Richard Brautigan honey pot at the used bookstore (Babbit's Books). RB is one of my favorite authors and probably the writer that has influenced and inspired me most in my own writing. I dig em. His work has meant so much to me in so many different periods of my life. His style of poetry has been termed "Brautigans," characterized by short, often ironic, always honest dictum on the daily life of a weird Californian. Here's a few gems:

Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes

fuck me like fried potatoes

on the most beautifully hungry

morning of my God-damn life.

Autobiography (when the moon shines like a dead garage)

When the moon shines like a dead garage

I travel with gasoline ghosts down all those haunted

miles of the past, twenty-seven Model A miles an hour

in 1939, going to where I have forgotten.

I think I'll try a few of my own "Brautigans."

Exercise in Exorcism

there are two kinds of men at the gym

the kind who will ask you how to use the machine

and the kind that will stare at you like a lion

three machines away.

Death

asking for help

seems redundant

You Are a Powerline

A monolith

Static zinging in my ears

You're probably giving me cancer

but being near your electricity is probably worth

the chemo.

An Assault on Everything Deemed Sophisticated

An assault on everything
Deemed Sophisticated

Fuck you.
I'm from the Midwest,
I've got frost and heat rash.

Fuck the new yorker
you bore me to tears.

From coast to coast
Boston to San Diego,
landlocked is where it's at

Fuck you caviar, cristal, and pate
you impale my palette.
Give me rice pudding, french fries, and fancy ketchup.

Fuck you fishnet stocking
sing songy
stegner fellow.

I like my music on the seedy side,
No harpsichord or well tuned strings.

Muddy Water sweating like a sow, no sexy inflated
bustier rocketing him to the top o' the pops.

Bob Dylan snorting cocaine off a piano is a real gas
not, because I advocate drugs,

but because I advocate rock & roll excess and
sloppy creative wanderings (trips).

Who makes these rules?
Is it you?
Because I'm just unsophisticated enough to
punch you right in the face.

That is if it will allow me the right to:

drink straight from the cotainer
rest my damned elbows on the table
mix black and brown
and
wear white after labor day.

But, I'm a mid-western pacifist.

I'll just stay out too late
Kiss too long, and talk out of turn.

Reservations are overrated,
just ask the Indians.


* Wrote this in November 2006. Rereading the beginning of my blog (Gravity is Bringing Me Down). Boy do I feel like a different person. I'm not sure I like who my blog has become, and how much of that is a reflection of me? All my poems are shaded for dark feelings. I need to get out more.

Back Breaker/Heart Breakin

Life

Out of chaos

A concierto

A Rowdy night with friends

A love affair

A suicide

Sleeping under a blank night sky

These are the things which quiet our souls

Living is a heartbreaking work

Out of one million innumerable wrongs

One right.

Like a Ball of Yarn

Ours is a good life
Yours is a good life
Your space is a good space

We are all just a bunch of matter
Synapses firing
Gap junctions

Touching faces
A sweet compulsion
Taking care of my tummy

Atmospheres

Ten Words x's 5 + 4

My Hell is a Good Life

Moving Through Spaces
The devil inside me
And the ground below
It's nothing like
What they want it to be
I'm nothing like I thought I'd be
My hell is a good life
I'm so damn nostalgic for things
That have yet to pass.

Life With Me

An old friend reminded me the other day that I used to write. I miss it in a way. I've got a lot to write about, so I'm going to try. I make no promises. This is a collected quotation from somewhere (sorry no author):

To experience true bliss you must experience true pain, and both are fleeting.

I firmly agree.

Let's see what I can rustle up these days, stay tuned.

It Must Be

When I find a poet I don't like it always makes me want to write poems.
I think that most people are supposed to find inspiration in other poets?

Oh well, whatever gets me writing eh?

I promise a little something within the next week. Or rather I promise myself to hack something out because I will feel like a failure otherwise. (My hands have been quick on the D.I.Y sector lately so there)