Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always pushing the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the…
Something has been growing around here, something is going on. I look for signs that we are all being filmed by slow cameras. Around us beds go mad making themselves; pots boil & empty & fill again like magic; toilets convulse & flush under cold porcelain; Wall paint thins to a sigh. Our underwear greys…
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already — the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are…
Long after you have swung back away from me I think you are still with me:you come close to the shore on the tide and nudge me awake the way a boat nudges the pier: am I a pier half-in half-out of the water? and in the pleasure of that communion I lose track, the…
Ink runs from the corner of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry The librarian does not believe what she sees. Here eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs…
The people of my time are passing away: my wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: it was once weddings that came so thick and fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: now, it’s this…
1 Who says science fiction is only set in the future? After a while, the story that looks least believable is the past. The console television with three channels. Black and white picture. Manual controls: the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven. You have to get up and walk somewhere to change…
Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafés. It was a time of general confusion Of being a body hurled at a wall. I…
I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. “Sit down and have a drink” he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. “You have SARDINES in it.” “Yes, it…
My grandpa was a farmer shaved with big hands on his straightedge wiping grey goo onto a newspaper fold at the kitchen table white chipped pan warm dirty water he stared out at the fields never missed a spothis eyes were set deep like a crop he’d always hoped for and he talked so slow…
After the teacher asked if anyone had a sacred place and the students fidgeted and shrank in their chairs, the most serious of them all said it was his car, being in it alone, his tape deck playing things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth had been spoken and began speaking about their rooms,…
