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)

Fatalist Wordplay

ALL CHOICES REPRESENT LOSS
ALL CHOICES REPRESENT LOSS
ALL CHOICES REPRESENT LOSS
ALL CHOICES REPRESENT LOSS
ALL CHOICES REPRESENT LOSS
ALL LOSS REPRESENTS CHOICE
ALL LOSS REPRESENTS CHOICE
ALL LOSS REPRESENTS CHOICE
ALL LOSS REPRESENTS CHOICE
ALL WE LOSE ALL WE LOSE
ALL WE LOSE ALL WE LOSE
ALL WE LOSE ALL WE LOSE
WE ALL LOSE, GOD DAMN IT.
But sometimes even the losers get lucky.

Skilling Drives it Home

I wonder what might have been with a hurricane
Cyclonic circulation whipping me about
Up and down in and out
So much work just to up and change direction

Everything intense
Always
Drenched to the marrow
And your hurricane is now a typhoon
With no eye in sight

I've always been exhilarated by inclement weather
In the end it might have killed me, but

Better to die by natural disaster than
Fade out
An untouchable Star

Regrets

I Just Wanted
to
Experience
Life
Outside
of
Normal.

W/You.

Electric, Eclectic

I watch them quarrel from a far.
Now who was in a better position to understand The Last Unicorn than The Last Unicorn? But all that incorrigible fool can see is the poet's sanguine face, all she can hear is her vitriolic talk. Of course she takes it personally. She, the saturnine, under a veil of piss.
They bid one another farewell. And The Last Unicorn is all by herself again.

I take out my pen and pad:
Dear Last Unicorn,
A poem must be as honest as an object crafted by a worker's hands. Please be careful there are all sorts of ghosts prowling these confused streets.
Yours,
The Last Unicorn

When The Last Unicorn found the smeared note she scribbled a reply:

Forget modern nature and scream for your lover. She paused and added this,
There is an inner universe with infinite possibilities. Too much to worry about old ghosts.

More Than Ten, More Than Words

A Multiple of Ten

Lace those slippery fingers
round my tired back

Too many vertebra
but I'll keep typing
keep swapping ideas

just so
so we can get out alive

imagine this
a body broken in pieces
of ten

Neglect

Thirty words. I won't let this thing COMPLETELY DIE.

History's beaten the hazard
A Stranger in a dark place
A Hog in a Kitchen
A Little girl in a big city

The blind are more determined to see
"A place a time gone out of mind"



That last line is Plath from her book of poetry "Collosus"

Saturday + Sunday

Twenty words:

I won't leave my bed until the last snowflake dies. My skin is on the brink of extinction. Damn dry.


This is how I feel today. Tired and dry and pajama(ed) at 8:30.

Thursday + Friday

Day 6 - Twenty Words

Indescriminate winds blow hard on my soft face. Steel wool clouds threaten me from an ivory sky. It's only winter.

Day 5

Winter
color palette:
grey,
black,
and
white.
Shades of yuck.

Winter is sort of boring to the eye, beyond a fresh snow fall, it's pretty ugly!

On Track, but for How Long?

Subject: Winter

So today I decided to google image the word winter and write my words based on the first picture that came up: It's a picture from a website for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

snow
won't leave
sun
won't shine
maybe
I'll die
alone

The brevity of these things sort of bother me. Maybe I'll increase the word count by weeks instead of months ...

Catch up

Day Three:
I fell behind (excuses!), so I decided to force catch up. I owe forty words today. However, I did go to a poetry reading last night, which should count for some kind of creative stimulation points!

Contrasts of night and day
No longer exist
We've gotten lost in the months
Nights and Days run into
One another
Winter is a void
Nothing is alive in a void
Everything must die in order to live
Once again

Day2

Subject: Winter

wet feet
dry lips
wait till
I get you
home

Explanation: Cold weather does a number on the body, but it also forces you to become a body-heat thief. Which ain't half bad.

Ten Words - Day 1

This blog has been created to keep me writing, everyday, all the time, even if I don't want to. Art is hard work and creativity must be cultivated. For a period of a month I will write at least ten words per day on a given subject. After one month the word count will increase by an increment of two words per month. The ten words must be a cohesive "unit." The cohensiveness may be loose, but the ten words should be followed by a brief explication. Feel free to post your own ten words, criticize me, or choose the subject for the next month.

Subject: Winter
Day 1:

Pale Skies
Lack of Sunshine
Lost in Sheets
of White

I don't think this guy really needs an explanation. Huzzah!