Shifting Sound

At times I couldn't believe you were real, it was like you crawled out of the t.v. and set yourself free, I never wanted to turn you off.
If I sing you a song long enough,
will you notice my callouses and fall in love with my cow lick?
Will you move closer to hear my every breath tick in and out.
I rewind my mind:
park to parking
apartment to the carpet,
where I could see all the years you'd lived and everything you did.
And maybe I'm not thinking this all the way through but
it's nonsense how your eyes stay awake like parking lot lights like the do.
I'm listening to your favorite singer, imagining what you looked like the first time you heard it, lips pursed and heart pulsing.
All the times after that when you'd memorized the words and the beat,
folding your feet
holding your hands,
and the last time.
It's a past-time of mine.
We weren't passing time, we were throwing it back and forth, and when I had to let it go, I drove around in circles trying to steady my spinning head.

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Charles Bukowski

Mad Girl's Love Song-Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

SHE EXCEEDS HER INSTRUCTIONS

She exceeds her instructions
and winds up facing an assassin
amid elephants, which is perhaps
why she hears the ceiling
but is not thereby diverted to Namibia, land of secret
fantasies and rust
and phosphorescent beings and clocks hanging out.
Donning a makeshift phlox,
what a painter are we, she thinks
to pursue her unusual hobby:
the back of room of trees and hilarious thoughts.
This is what she's found out:
Companionship is killer.
Emily Polifax is a secret agent.
Leopards are hard to believe, so
normal, though not particularly attractive. Later, on the green
face of things, she's reflective--
almost considerably--the sirens
are ecstatic when the telephone rings
it's always a delightful romance
another set of instructions
to photograph her fellow tourists
or plant a poison dart
in the the of a fabulous widower.
All at once, she sees it, everything
is essential-the bus ticket, the safari
shift cork helmet, the red plastic
blanket. Suddenly, even the the cozy grand
piano has a chance of falling
fourteen stories to the concrete
in love. Perhaps looking after these
you can really learn a lot. Get going. There is work
on the horizon. These are her coordinates.
Her name is Tape Recorder. In shorthand
take the wallpaper. Good night xxxx
and good luck.

19 & 29

No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to at thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everthing, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing, wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angled in Heaven

Shit Yeah Whitman!

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men-go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families-re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

-Walt Whitman

Oh Man

Well for a while there I was a poetry writing machine but I've gone back to drawing now and I gotta say it's a lot easier and much more fun