Abraham Lincoln’s Uncircumcised Penis

too much of a Metalica urethra, though
to really matter;

We had the delicious cherries of Door County
sloshing around our Vicodin suppositories.

let’s face it: The only Joni Mitchell in town.

Zapping various organs along the

county line artifice;

a clown’s head got big and
we had to act.

Now there was a new Joni Mitchell in town
reeling down the grocery aisles
a real adventure in subterranean living;

and a lesson in bifurcated government forms
a subtle rash along the pubic area.

Hand dribbling or Corpus Christi luxuriating
outward of the orange turnstile’s
dilapidary code;

coffee cups atop benches
with overpraised vocal chords etc.

When etcetera means instant boner

for the new Chief of the boner patrol,
an ebony Joni Mitchell.

And perforated oceans won’t stop us...

our own love might though, it’s on the way,
but the perforated oceans, with their
perforates

or gloom in the form of snail pie...

prob'ly not.

Sigh.

Watch Your Mouth

I like the idea of stopping a conversation by saying "Watch your mouth!".

Mike Is Pathetic And Loves No Age, Finally, And Believes The Generation Right After His Is Probably The Emo Generation But He Likes People Who Sing Out of Tune (And He Knows Alot of Emo Dudes Are Way Not In Tune But He Likes Malkmus not-in-tune as Opposed to Conor Oberst not-in-tune, There's A Huge-ass Difference)

So how is this No Age band doing basicly the same thing that at least alot of other indie bands are doing, and yet their music is so fucking good?

Take "Cappo". Off-kilter guitar and drum stomping: Check. Loping teenlove tempo: Check. Two people in the band: Check. Sort of introspective lyrics: Check.

Sorry. It's not them, it's me.

But it all sounds so, I don't know, youthful. Kind of like if the Ramones were born 30 years later. No, if the Ramones grew up on Dinosaur Jr. No wait, if the Ramones grew up on Sonic Youth.

Oh and I only have half of Nouns. You know... and there's half of Weirdo Rippers, a more open-ended affair, psych-....

Man that one Flying Saucer Attack song "Come And Close My Eyes" used to really make me wish I had a girlfriend. It's one of those songs that makes you wish you had a girlfriend. Let's see, "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House" that's another one. This can all be googled.

But "Come And Close My Eyes" is in a peculiar wish-I-had-a-girlfriend or WIHAG category, which is the post-apoclyptic wish-I-had-a-girlfriend category. Pretty much, listen to Sonic Youth say circa Sister and you get my drift.

Maybe someday all of our girlfriends and boyfriends will post-apocalyptic girlfriends and boyfriends is all I'm saying. And we can listen to No Age, then.

Salacious Banter Update

I haven't informed Karl of this yet, but Salacious Banter Readings from now on are going to take place here.

Dream Punt

I've always been fascinated and perplexed by how to act. As in the "...don't know how to act", "how you gonna act".

I'm gonna go out on sort of a limb here and put forth the idea that whatever this "knowing how to act" is, that knowing how to act is a way to get your work published, whatever genre. Publishing in the Small Press world is essentially knowing how to move in within groups, how to connect and get one's work published is it not? So I've been thinking that getting the work placed is a social skill. So does that mean that whoever happens to have been influenced by Robert Creeley and was the Prom Queen in High School is bound to have the most chapbooks published?

There is a part of me that dismisses even the premise of that question, and another part of me that thinks that's an exaggeration but says Yes that's kind of the case. But what kind of a person carries around some supposed wounds from High School and applies them to poetry? What could that possibly be other then some kind of passive-aggressive projection.

I've figured out by this point that there are certain basic steps in getting the work published if you don't wanna go the Emily Dickinson route.

1. Correspondences: write to writers; saying what tho? omigodyourworkissoimportanttome? How did you write your books? How did your work get published? How is Bob Perelman?

2. Publishing in a number of literary magazines, thereby letting others get acquainted slowly at their speed with your work, letting them wade into the pool of You waistdeep. (But then is a person their work? Of course not. Goddamit... Fuckit...)

And yet I'm still kind of perplexed at how all this happens, but I'm actually not, I'm just angry at it. I don't know.

After Lisa Jarnot and George Michael

I think there’s something you should know
I think there’s a shadow over your face
from the sweater-print I think it’s time
I told you so

I think that all we have to do now is take
these lies and make them true and make these dreams
into transactions of faith and make these wishes
closer to you and better by me and wish for
the transmutation of the sweater to tell us

something beautiful about the weather at the zoo
and the fashion show and
something beautiful about the weather
in Air Force One and the weather on the tarmac
and the sun which leans in to confide

it’s thoughts about box office records
and quilting in the south and laughter on the fringe

the mania of thus on city buses
feels like the road to heaven looks like
the road to hell and thus the failure
to make us laugh or make us dance
our failure to quilt and sing and
make love in otherwise unorthodox ways

that logs on and simultaneously out
I think I’m back down to earth on this
I think we’re through with singing in the rain
I think there’s someone with a transfer
I think we better ask somebody

After Lisa Jarnot and Scritti Politti

where the money flows toward
the ocean where the money is ready for love

because of the 1980s
that the world is mystifying
and conspicuously passionate
fortifying and with an emphasis on production

leafless done down
bloodless all but the most delicious sequins

comma holding tanks for
conscious elegies rammed forth
by teenage boys and the aunts
and sickly farm implements
and the animals that operate their

solar panoptic contingency
where the money flows toward
the ocean where the money is ready for love
in the ocean and the sequined tears

and the poor old boats
or said contingency in homage
and the brain which is key which is
mysterious and says perverted things

that flood the oil tankers with love that flood
the oil tankers with artificial snare hits

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

I don't know I'm thinking about a crustal abbreviation now for the text. Or the poetics of that smurf-dandy secretion are here already.

Knowing tools or like function. An excitable sex position or classic SNL quote, but either way a bumpkins foot stool for thinkin' rowdy stuff round said secretion. Militant anyway attention span of the already always there wayward passive clicker finger.

To surmise, write poems in war crouch and gangsta slouch.

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

As ridiculous as the dream where Rowdy Roddy Piper is telling Robert Creeley to stop making friends.

Into feelings burgled without and not-in the bounds of your Grandma's depression. Builds bleek food conspiracies into hovelable cock-eyed clinching fingers.

A man stood a bison or weathering his top-spin of simpression. Dupression. Synechdotion.

Happy birthday envelope.

Cold climbing down through a gender specificity.

Joints pooling there corners and curlicues and trying pass on the traditions of haberdashery.

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

It is hard to imagine how poetry in it's own mind. In what wondering filling up glances nervous-like Your Grocer's Shelves.

How to hide green poetry grocer reducer, or find fissionable material for that matter, is poetry's Poetica Ashante Sashe. Poetry grounds finite observations inside little baby human dryers.

That's fucked up. Or that's come into it's weatherable ass-face architecture.

And in blank spots finding new avenue cloisters banana talk spores through forms or reprisal. A ticket god, y'see.

Human squirrel!

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

In the near constant-gathering coming up poetry will who-knows what it thinks in it's own mind.

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

Poetry in Social Star Wars is ultra-complex Jedi training in Jedi training relationships between Jedi jumpsuits in Jedi perpindicular spaces where you earn the right to help so & so hem in so & so's ultra spandex proto-Jedi more fixedly within the globo-not-fascistic-utra-cool-Jedi realm.

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

This blog has become steadily more opaque. Which has been become its format. Which is me trying to articulate myself then essentially musing on some idea of what is essentially dicking around.

If dicking around brings up the rear, it takes on whole other connotations. It could become ego-trippin. But if I ego trip for awhile I seem to invariably end up out of my depth.

Standing tall on the wings of my dreams. Slouching under poetry's wing, which smells like curry and old spice.

TO BE CONTINUED

How To Be Lazy Writing About Poetics

Is there an alienation effect in the company of poets?

In other words, should a poet not be "chummy" with their audience? Making it all a little inside? A little too inside?

A little tutu aboard a whaling ship?

Poets should probably talk to their audience without assumptions. But don't assume we don't know who Jack Spicer is jack-ass! And conversely, Don't assume we know who Jack Spicer is jack-ass!

Just explain who Jack Spicer is and then say, 'y' know... Jack Spicer' And be prepared for Jack Spicer to stop talking to you.

The audience does not want to see the poet talking to other poets, they want to see the poet talking to other poets.

Like, flip it around on em. Yeah, and since you're using a whole bunch of words I don't understand, I'm gonna go ahead and take that as an insult.

This is directed at anyone where I've ever woken with their hand in my pants, when it should be in my poems. This is implicated in my style. It is an assumed Spicerian eye-roll. On a Spicerian California roll.

Does poetry have to have an indentifiable matrix to be written about?

Salacious Banter Reading Series
Thursday, June 26th

Jess Mynes
Michael Carr
Dana Ward

Food & Drinks @ 6:30
Reading Promptly @ 7:30
900 S 5th St.(5th & Walker / Enter on Walker)
Milwaukee

salaciousbanter AT gmail DOT com

French Coat

Aphasia is a byword of patience
a trick feeling, to have compensated
in odds of disturbance. Consent
and mingled popularity

become details to
handsome mercy, the aritillery of
the women in my life. A person of
quality will understand

showing judicious license therefore
not be treated with indifference,
maybe you would have
overt concern if there's such
thing as compulsion. Being welcomed

in a large city gets cold
in my eyes, relying on selective help
one might not credibly avoid.

2.
As sober bait I mustn't be qualified
projecting on what may have
happened within an aquifer. They abandon
the parking or add dependent on enough

double access; the welfare of
a personal condition makes it worth
replying believably or a credible
witness's safety. Waiting for a stretch in the
kitchen while outside

someone is sent to guide them to the
address. Immediate
response gets in the way of visible
excess, as a voluntary buffer
I was determined to listen. Behind on

new year the empathy lines
seem punctured because of
foreign movies.


--Michael Carr

Salacious Banter Reading Series
Thursday, June 26th

Jess Mynes
Michael Carr
Dana Ward

Food & Drinks @ 6:30
Reading Promptly @ 7:30
900 S 5th St.(5th & Walker / Enter on Walker)
Milwaukee

salaciousbanter AT gmail DOT com

Aphids 

for Publico 2003-2008

"not sinking into the ground, mysteriously,
but in the Roman sewers, forever, our home town"

--George Stanley

Aphids are
whatever feeds on the
emptied momentum that
tastes of white pine. Bang it
in your car b-bang it
in your truck
The Easter
LV on a Luis Vuitton bag
explodes with engorging neutrinos and I
see its dove-meat that's gene-spliced to soft Beijing leather.
False fathers husbands believers--moonshine
pours through the dikes, Animiniacs
who? They're the false husbands fathers, believers
aphids leave honeydew
crucibles deep in their features until they're
like astrolabes tending immobile stars.
But you can't judge the Universe
wounded pride blooming like lake district summer
flushed soft & fast down the fucking brass ring.
Golden retrievers explode in the verdure
who can put dogs back together?
Big Dad in Valhalla
the boatman named Sex,
Rasputina
my collar & tag start to hurt.
Tell me dad what should I do with my pleasure?
destroy it, confirming its own malign life
or embrace it by means of
deformative play? It ends well, in war
you learn how to catalogue ships in the dark
describing the plant lice that feed on couture,
where, because we are impure & live
our reveries aren't overcome. But they are
dad I saw the raw data, the tombs flaring
various prismatic fires
their Oceanside camps between Clay St. & Main,
sweating a vicious armada.
No dad we won't eat you
the lights in the Mediterranean, lights in the high
blocks of Over-the-Rhine,
we've been here a long time
amid the Emerald City, amid the walls of Troy
Penelope Nokia Telephone
rings many suitors
with fabulous answers & lies
whisper comely things through the receiver. Hello?
dad the aphids invaded my
arm daddy what should I do I would chill
son &, drink. Recreational love-making
inside a project space
"dusted"
in theory & fact.

Yet later
the aphids have gone
& the goddamn garden goes
on with the imporous
posture of some
politician

I come to this altar piece
Clear eyed and mean
from deep in the mind of a parasite
teasing your dad for his ambulant lock
derive in reverse
a real Sasquach without any
frothing pulling teething
in the mouth. Its only the North Pole honey
its only the summerless agony
how will we
remember
how will I remember
this

I cried again
in school today, they
asked me my feelings for Polaroid pictures
for me they're Victorian things
fairy tale mice with a
sun-ruined Cheshire life gutted
color wheel light for their unstable sign.
I saw their tombs in the dawn (basically)
cradle with all of its blisters in tact
beckons like bubble wrap, pop
the encasements of that
& the honeydew pours out in torrents of pixels
floriated like love's will in "Asphodel", nothing
to drink in what's now just decor.
Sutter Home here
in your Venice, the many-canaled
hollowed out neural city
lasciviously broken
sobriety
comes
down like the church yard nativity, piece
by delirious piece
until there is goose-flesh
all over the Virgin.
I feel it too
in the end of the song
& the lights coming up at last call, that
panic.


-Dana Ward