I knew a woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

record

Late night July
in Minnesota, with John
asleep on the glassed-in porch,

I listen (quietly)
to Bob Dylan on a cassette
you made from an album

I got rid of soon after
you died. Years later,
I regret giving up

your two moving boxes
of vinyl (which I loved)
in a stand against the futility

of saving outdated things.
Surely they were too awkward,
too easily broken,

too poorly mastered
for people who loved music
the way we did. But tonight

I’m in the mood for ghosts
like you, for being
younger, since you’re a

big girl, now I’m thirty-one
to your unchanging twenty-five.
In the mood for sounds

we hated: pop, scratch,
hiss, the occasional
skip. The curtains balloon;

I’ve got a beer; I’m struck
by guilt, watching you
from a place ten years away,

kneeling and cleaning each
with a velvet brush before
and after, tucking them in

their sleeves. Understand,
I was still moving then.
The boxes were heavy.

If I’d known I’d stop here
with a husband to help me
carry, and room—too late,

the college kids pick over
your black bones on Mass. Ave.,
we’ll meet again some day

on the avenue but still,
I want to hear it, the needle
hitting the end of a side

and playing silence
until the arm gives up,
pulls away.

jasmine

I sit beside two women, kitty-corner
to the stage, as Elvin’s sticks blur
the club into a blue fantasia.
I thought my body had forgotten the Deep
South, how I’d cross the street
if a woman like these two walked
towards me, as if a cat traversed
my path beneath the evening star.
Which one is wearing jasmine?
If my grandmothers saw me now
they’d say, Boy, the devil never sleeps.
My mind is lost among November
cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face
as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes
of chance on his upright
leaning into the future.
The blonde, the brunette—
which one is scented with jasmine?
I can hear Duke in the right hand
& Basie in the left
as the young piano player
nudges us into the past.
The trumpet’s almost kissed
by enough pain. Give him a few more years,
a few more ghosts to embrace—Clifford’s
shadow on the edge of the stage.
The sign says, No Talking.
Elvin’s guardian angel lingers
at the top of the stairs,
counting each drop of sweat
paid in tribute. The blonde
has her eyes closed, & the brunette
is looking at me. Our bodies
sway to each riff, the jasmine
rising from a valley somewhere
in Egypt, a white moon
opening countless false mouths
of laughter. The midnight
gatherers are boys & girls
with the headlights of trucks
aimed at their backs, because
their small hands refuse to wound
the knowing scent hidden in each bloom.

drunk text message to god

carry the one

'George Watsky performing his poem "Carry the One" at the opening plenary of Greenbuild Chicago 2007. George took the stage directly before President Bill Clinton gave the keynote address to a crowd of almost 7,000 in the main conference and overflow room.'

for the breakdancers

Live from the individual finals of the National Poetry Slam 2007 in Austin, TX
(http://www.myspace.com/alvinlau)

for those who can ride in an airplane for the first time

short version, which I saw and wanted to blog:


long version:

(at the National Slam 2005, where he was losing his voice but he still won)

“I’m twenty-eight years old and trying to figure out most days what being a man means.
I don’t drink, fight or fuck but these days I find myself wanting to do all three.
I don’t really have a favorite color anymore, but I did when I was a kid.
And back then that color was blue, and back then I wanted to be an astronaut, an artist, an architect, a secret agent, a ranger for the World Wildlife Fund, and a hobo.
When I was six years old I used to always throw my clothes into my blue and yellow hot wheels car carrying suitcase and run away to beneath the dining room table.
I’ve made out with more girls than I wish I’d had and not nearly as many as I’d like to.
And I’ve been in love three times so I doubt I’m going to try that anymore.
And I spend most days making pictures or thinking about making pictures or masturbating or thinking about masturbating.
And I’m trying to find God everywhere and figure this thing he made called a man.
And the TV tells me its bare-knuckled bombing, so I guess if I had a tank or a missile my penis would be huge.
And thats what I want because thats what being a man means or at least thats what they keep telling me.
My pops, he takes care of us.
He puts the garbage out twice a week.
He drives forty-five minutes to water flowers.
I sit on the bus when a seven year-old boy sits down next to me and asks me my name.
“Anis.” That’s a nice name.
“Thank you, what’s yours?” Quentin.
Anis, do you want to read Robin Hood with me?
So tell me what my fists are writing, Mr. President.
My fingers, they open up like gates when I type and the wind is swinging in the wake, mother fucker.
I lift bridges with poems and forests grow in my mother’s eyes.
“I am looking for God, Quentin.”
“While this world says “fuck you” for trying.
For this world hates your eyes, Quentin.
For they are simple and pure.
And this world hates your fingers, Quentin, little like the stems of flowers.
For not being able to pick up the things you have left behind, because you are still learning to do so.
I don’t drink, fight, or fuck but these days it’s only two out of those three I don’t do, Quentin.
And I fall in love three times, so I don’t want to, want to, but I still do, Quentin.
And I want to find God in the morning, in the tired hands of dusk.
But, instead, I drive sixty through residential streets praying to hit a child so that they may stay forever night and forever red and forever full of light and crayons and simple outstretched limbs…
..Trying to pick up way too much way too fast, forgetting what it means to be a person.
In a world where egos are measured with tabloids, where automobiles are like morals, where beliefs are like naps, you leave them behind when somebody touches you.
And in a place where oil takes precedence over life, I find myself sitting on a bus, when a little boy floats down like fresh water, carrying a book I used to read and asks if I want to see what he sees if only for a little while.
Then asks if I want to give to him what I see if only for a little while, then says to me he’s going to show me the world.
And starts moving his fingers beneath the words, not always noticing what is written, sometimes skipping whole sentences, sometimes skipping whole lines…
…because his fingers are moving fast and I wanna tell him, “Slow down, Quentin.
You can see it all if your finger whispers on one word.
Slow down and hold what you see just a little bit longer.”
For in a world of fast faces, I’m looking for God everywhere, trying to figure out a little better this little thing he made called a man.”

(source)

the revolution will not be televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

oda a federico garcía lorca / ode to federico garcía lorca

Si pudiera llorar de miedo en una casa sola,
si pudiera sacarme los ojos y comérmelos,
lo haría por tu voz de naranjo enlutado
y por tu poesía que sale dando gritos.

Porque por ti pintan de azul los hospitales
y crecen las escuelas y los barrios marítimos,
y se pueblan de plumas los ángeles heridos,
y se cubren de escamas los pescados nupciales,
y van volando al cielo los erizos:
por ti las sastrerías con sus negras membranas
se llenan de cucharas y de sangre
y tragan cintas rotas, y se matan a besos,
y se visten de blanco.

Cuando vuelas vestido de durazno,
cuando ríes con risa de arroz huracanado,
cuando para cantar sacudes las arterias y los dientes,
la garganta y los dedos,
me moriría por lo dulce que eres,
me moriría por los lagos rojos
en donde en medio del otoño vives
con un corcel caído y un dios ensangrentado,
me moriría por los cementerios
que como cenicientos ríos pasan
con agua y tumbas,
de noche, entre campanas ahogadas:
ríos espesos como dormitorios
de soldados enfermos, que de súbito crecen
hacia la muerte en ríos con números de mármol
y coronas podridas, y aceites funerales:
me moriría por verte de noche
mirar pasar las cruces anegadas,
de pie llorando,
porque ante el río de la muerte lloras
abandonadamente, heridamente,
lloras llorando, con los ojos llenos
de lágrimas, de lágrimas, de lágrimas.

Si pudiera de noche, perdidamente solo,
acumular olvido y sombra y humo
sobre ferrocarriles y vapores,
con un embudo negro,
mordiendo las cenizas,
lo haría por el árbol en que creces,
por los nidos de aguas doradas que reúnes,
y por la enredadera que te cubre los huesos
comunicándote el secreto de la noche.

Ciudades con olor a cebolla mojada
esperan que tú pases cantando roncamente,
y silenciosos barcos de esperma te persiguen,
y golondrinas verdes hacen nido en tu pelo,
y además caracoles y semanas,
mástiles enrollados y cerezas
definitivamente circulan cuando asoman
tu pálida cabeza de quince ojos
y tu boca de sangre sumergida.

Si pudiera llenar de hollín las alcaldías
y, sollozando, derribar relojes,
sería para ver cuándo a tu casa
llega el verano con los labios rotos,
llegan muchas personas de traje agonizante,
llegan regiones de triste esplendor,
llegan arados muertos y amapolas,
llegan enterradores y jinetes,
llegan planetas y mapas con sangre,
llegan buzos cubiertos de ceniza,
llegan enmascarados arrastrando doncellas
atravesadas por grandes cuchillos,
llegan raíces, venas, hospitales,
manantiales, hormigas,
llega la noche con la cama en donde
muere entre las arañas un húsar solitario,
llega una rosa de odio y alfileres,
llega una embarcación amarillenta,
llega un día de viento con un niño,
llego yo con Oliverio, Norah
Vicente Aleixandre, Delia,
Maruca, Malva Marina, María Luisa y Larco,
la Rubia, Rafael Ugarte,
Cotapos, Rafael Alberti,
Carlos, Bebé, Manolo Altolaguirre,
Molinari,
Rosales, Concha Méndez,
y otros que se me olvidan.
Ven a que te corone, joven de la salud
y de la mariposa, joven puro
como un negro relámpago perpetuamente libre,
y conversando entre nosotros,
ahora, cuando no queda nadie entre las rocas,
hablemos sencillamente como eres tú y soy yo:
para qué sirven los versos si no es para el rocío?

Para qué sirven los versos si no es para esa noche
en que un puñal amargo nos averigua, para ese día,
para ese crepúsculo, para ese rincón roto
donde el golpeado corazón del hombre se dispone a morir?

Sobre todo de noche,
de noche hay muchas estrellas,
todas dentro de un río
como una cinta junto a las ventanas
de las casas llenas de pobres gentes.

Alguien se les ha muerto, tal vez
han perdido sus colocaciones en las oficinas,
en los hospitales, en los ascensores,
en las minas,
sufren los seres tercamente heridos
y hay propósito y llanto en todas partes:
mientras las estrellas corren dentro de un río interminable
hay mucho llanto en las ventanas,
los umbrales están gastados por el llanto,
las alcobas están mojadas por el llanto
que llega en forma de ola a morder las alfombras.

Federico,
tú ves el mundo, las calles,
el vinagre,
las despedidas en las estaciones
cuando el humo levanta sus ruedas decisivas
hacia donde no hay nada sino algunas
separaciones, piedras, vías férreas.

Hay tantas gentes haciendo preguntas
por todas partes.
Hay el ciego sangriento, y el iracundo, y el
desanimado,
y el miserable, el árbol de las uñas,
el bandolero con la envidia a cuestas.

Así es la vida, Federico, aquí tienes
las cosas que te puede ofrecer mi amistad
de melancólico varón varonil.
Ya sabes por ti mismo muchas cosas.
Y otras irás sabiendo lentamente.

---

If I could weep with fear in a solitary house,

if I could take out my eyes and eat them,

I would do it for your black-draped orange-tree voice

and for your poetry that comes forth shouting.

Because for you they paint hospitals bright blue,

and schools and sailors' quarters grow,

and wounded angels are covered with feathers,

and nuptial fish are covered with scales,

and hedgehogs go flying to the sky:

for you tailorshops with their black skins

fill up with spoons and blood,

and swallow red ribbons and kiss each other to death,

and dress in white.

When you fly dressed as a peach tree,

when you laugh with a laugh of hurricaned rice,

when to sing you shake arteries and teeth,

throat and fingers,

I could die for how sweet you are,

I could die for the red lakes

where in the midst of autumn you live

with a fallen steed and a bloodied god,

I could die for the cemeteries

that pass like ash-gray rivers

with water and tombs,

at night, among drowned bells:

rivers as thick as wards

of sick soldiers, that suddenly grow

toward death in rivers with marble numbers

and rotted crowns, and funeral oils:

I could die to see you at night

watching the sunken crosses go by,

standing and weeping,

because before death's river you weep

forlornly, woundedly,

you weep weeping, your eyes filled

with tears, with tears, with tears.

If at night, wildly alone, I could

gather oblivion and shadow and smoke

above railroads and steamships,

with a black funnel,

biting the ashes,

I would do it for the tree in which you grow,

for the nests of golden waters that you gather,

and for the vine that covers your bones,

revealing to you the secret of the night.

Cities with a smell of wet onions

wait for you to pass singing raucously,

and silent sperm boats pursue you,

and green swallows nest in your hair,

and also snails and weeks,

furled masts and cherry trees

definitively walk about when they glimpse

your pale fifteen-eyed head

and your mouth of submerged blood.

If I could fill town halls with soot

and, sobbing, tear down clocks,

it would be to see when to your house

comes summer with its broken lips,

come many people with dying clothes,

come regions of sad splendor,

come dead plows and poppies,

come gravediggers and horsemen,

come planets and maps with blood,

come buzzards covered with ashes,

come masked men dragging damsels

pierced by great knives,

come roots, veins, hospitals,

springs, ants,

comes night with the bed where

a solitary hussar is dying among the spiders,

comes a rose of hatred and pins,

comes a yellowish vessel,

comes a windy day with a child,

come I with Oliverio, Norah,

Vicente Aleixandre, Delia,

Maruca, Malva Marina, María Luisa, and Larco,

the Blond, Rafael Ugarte,

Cotapos, Rafael Alberti,

Carlos, Bebé, Manolo Altolaguirre,

Molinari,
Rosales, Concha Méndez,

and others that slip my mind.

Come, let me crown you, youth of health,

and butterflies, youth pure

as a black lightningflash perpetually free,

and just between you and me,

now, when there is no one left among the rocks,

let us speak simply, man to man:

what are verses for if not for the dew?

What are verses for if not for that night

in which a bitter dagger finds us out, for that day,

for that dusk, for that broken corner

where the beaten heart of man makes ready to die?

Above all at night,

at night there are many stars,

all within a river

like a ribbon next to the windows

of houses filled with the poor.

Someone of theirs has died, perhaps

they have lost their jobs in the offices,

in the hospitals, in the elevators,

in the mines,

human beings suffer stubbornly wounded

and there are protests and weeping everywhere:

while the stars flow within an endless river

there is much weeping at the windows,

the thresholds are worn away by the weeping,

the bedrooms are soaked by the weeping

that comes wave-shaped to bite the carpets.

Federico,

you see the world, the streets,

the vinegar,

the farewells in the stations

when the smoke lifts its decisive wheels

toward where there is nothing but some

separations, stones, railroad tracks.

There are so many people asking questions

everywhere.

There is the bloody blindman, and the angry one, and the

disheartened one,

and the wretch, the thorn tree,

the bandit with envy on his back.

That's the way life is, Federico, here you have

the things that my friendship can offer you,

the friendship of a melancholy manly man.

By yourself you already know many things,

and others you will slowly get to know.

(translated by Donald D. Walsh)

number 8

It was a face which darkness could kill
               in an instant
a face as easily hurt
          by laughter or light

  'We think differently at night'
               she told me once
lying back languidly

          And she would quote Cocteau

'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
               'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away
     light a cigarette for me
               sigh and rise

and stretch
     her sweet anatomy

          let fall a stocking

poetry as insurgent art (i am signaling you through the flames)

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

musee des beaux arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.

these spiritual window-shoppers

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’ Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

lovesong

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other’s face

how to stop smoking

If you are a man
think of a woman wiggling out of her underwear
saying come on you don’t have to love me.

If you are a woman
think of the man thinking that.

Practice.

the thing is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

the starry night

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

—Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

brief song

When love carries us
to this altitude
of lean air, our heads
clear, our hearts
open like parachutes.

the release

At sunset
the shadows of all the trees
break free and go running
across the edge of the world.