the girl in the sand

can I work through the ancient language
be an interpreter of a lost heart?
can I see those images of the lathe turning
in the dark, revising the serried
outlines of the girl disinterred, fictive
illicit, burnt into the conscience? was
it really my work, my stark dreaming
of the menarchal child destroyed by
someone's confined understanding
in the daily day of here and then?

so I felt responsible
only for thinking it possible
and then it came true and truer
all around me the same story
repeated its details different and
varied yet the girl I met the
girl next door it happened to her
her crippled father wrecking her
very flesh not a murder
but too close to dissolution

we all struggle back from this loss
it is a version not of defeat but of
mourning
she mourned those days gone now
she mourned a different way of
loving her dad
she mourned all this yet I came along
with my story of the dead girl and
nothing was healed nothing really
changed perhaps the face of the
source of loss has been varied
varied and treated to his own loss
everything loss these many years the
girls the women the female being
murdered in nearly every part
of these thousands of days

I am savaged with self knowledge
trusting only to the attempt to live truthfully
the mourning continues doves leaving
the scene are you still out there
Miranda, the girl in the sand?

Failed Suicide, 1993

Her moans from the sunroom on 117 South
Grand were the first tracks of her betrayal;
later those cabins at Allerton she looked on
the young father from west illinois and found
another someone new to replace me she had
always had that list of boys/men
―the farmer-poet, the would-be Vallejo,
the jazz-drummer—methedrine in his blood stream,
the saxophoner from the punk band, food & money
singing about Argentina, “land of meat”.
She sent that one mash notes. Her spirals were
composed of bitter, innocent stories,
her passions avoiding the real issue:
her father's religious requirement
to void the dark lust that lived like
a dead snake deep in his armor,
a ghost snake a snake of hatred.
And my catholic pre-occupation with
her pain primed me to take her path
too many times (my) mind overlain
with an extra-terrestrial reality.

She fucked me over boys.
The truth is, she got tired of me.
Tired of the same old stories,
too much like her sick grandfather.
And then the bad chance, the poet laureate,
he didn't come through for her.
Left her living in a garret
with my five year old daughter in
a sad neighborhood in Bloomington.
Is this history or just a long-awaited panic?
I let the pain take me to the hardware store.
I bought the plastic and
walled myself in the kitchen,
turned on the gas.
She almost killed me.
I am certain that was her plan.
Fuck her. And fuck her minor art.
She could have been the real thing.
If only she could have gambled honestly.
If only she could look in the mirror
And open her eyes.

song of the stoned gambler, revised

would-be Vallejo
first goattee I knew well
zapata must've had hair like your's
black, shiny, full, hanging down
below your neck
a revolutionary understanding
for a middle class boy
from upstate Illinois (Dixon/Mt. Sterling)
would-be Vallejo
polishing rocks in time's stream
carving moments on your lover's thigh
disappearing from the poker game
eliciting oral sex from my ex-wife
rehearsing hard-edged ambitions borrowed
from your greek twin
who's own fate staggered through
a series of deaths
would-be Vallejo
your Goddess came and changed your definitions
of goats and soups the scrabbled
games of accusation and meaning
you couldn't understand her daughter
your culture cut you off at the knees
down under it there was always
some smoke the words like beetles
crawling through the Aztec mosaic
you made of your brain
what isssssss /it a............llll
about? strange middle class king
of ancient aboriginal cultures
lurking now a thousand years
along the trail of dissonance
some spaniards brought Jesus for the
Virgin of Guadalupe to give birth to...
paranoid, commented, chained
to the bottom of a dinette set seat
every meal casting off dark gases
in the shroud of living and dying
would-be Vallejo you were never
in prison for the love of a beautiful
girl or for revolutionary times
surely you have awakened by now
given up the old story
admitted the rapes of your youth
the failures of your would-be poems
nothing will solve the crossword
except truth, something to choke
on. Her words exist still as mist
in a country of light.

Ric Amezquita turned me onto the peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo and his great masterwork, Trilce. That book had a profound effect on me, though not the same way it did on Ricardo. Amezquita had a good friend, Tony Kallas, dark, greek, smart, who wrote like Charlie Bukowski. And Ric had first an affair with Becky Bradway, while his longterm girlfriend, Rosie Richmond was trying to make a new life in California. He did like to smoke a lot of pot and play poker. He wasn't very good at it, but like all those Hemingway-esque writers at that time he pretended he knew what was going on. This piece posits Rosie as the Goddess in Ric's life. She was, yet he could never quite accept that and they never successfully lived together for very long. Ah well. I do think this version is much better than the original version, published in this blog in 2005. Tell me what you think, anyone?

in this vision

this woman is white, so very white
her limbs are geometric, tense and predictive
her skeleton is the armature for this fate
her translucent flesh, grey, pink, wet, open
waiting for that certain key, that poem

darling we have to join
hip to hip word to word
we have to serve this universe
in the night you become the
huntress and I become the
great Stag of the forest
the marriage must be made
I hear you in the savage wind
the time has come
the tree is suddenly in flames
all that I have been
turns to your face

An early goddess poem, written in the period between Becky Bradway and Kimberly Britton. I spent several years there, without a lover, reading about the White Lady. I never trolled for women. I didn't go to the bars. I did have an abortive affair with Connie Panichi. I lived inside a dream, really. It's a hard thing, but somehow I knew that the Lady would bring me someone. And that is exactly what happened.

Sleeping Beauty Awakened

From the passing bus the brick home
on the boulevard's corner seems asleep
eyes flipped the mini-blinds turned up
... a hundred years pass
the noises of birth & death in a two-step
while sleeping beauty casts off the down
comforter and looks at the arab in her bed

suddenly the cat demands his freedom
the dog sneaks out the back gate
the child, in her room, wads grandma's
unused fabrics around her in role after role

beauty does not wake the arab
she has her own great white to pursue
and it has been one hundred years now
She dons her rob & slips back
into the real world

the Ay-rab is secretly awake
in fact he hasn't slept now, for 100 years.
His kiss did not wake her, but he
would not give up. He listens to the child
speaking rhymes. He feels better.
He remembers the whale's
terrible, glorious attack.
the Ice breaks in his heart
... beauty, beauty, beauty

a hundred years before she climbed aboard the bus
john lennon died and she sent the arab away
the south fifth street thunders across the boulevard
in the sandy soil the great white sleeps
even today

From the manuscript Approaching Candlemas in a Sports Car, Poems on the subject of need in a damaged universe. This poem was written after Becky Bradway left me. She is posited as sleeping beauty here. This refers to her avoiding the subject of her father's abuse for so many years. We lived in a house on the corner of 10th Street and Bryn Mawr in south Springfield. Years before we bought that house (1987) Becky lived on South 9th Street and often took the bus to SSU. It ran up 10th, right past the house and she imagined living in that house. Becky left me in 1993, so she lived there for almost six years. I lived there another six years before moving in 1999.

In that house Paige had a trunk full of fabric pieces that Connie Bradway had bought and never got around to using. Paige made them into innumerable costumes. Lots of fun there. I'm the arab here and yes it is meant to speak to Captain A-hab and the great white whale that signified the ambition of ego and death. I did love Becky, but by then she had awakened and there was no love for me in this picture. I accepted that, because one has to accept that you can't make someone love you. Either they do, or they don't. I have come to believe that Becky never really loved me, or maybe anyone. But I know that Kimberly Britton loves me as no one has ever loved me. And conversely, I love her in a way I have never loved before. Love reciprocated is far greater than a mere sum. It is a thing that grows, a song becoming light, the breath of the Lady in the sail of this existence. There I go, mixing my metaphors again.

syntax, unbetrayed

there is neither a shuffling nor a memory here
the rain is in spain or the basement
the narrowness of my vision doesn't funnel truth
no one keeps track but the women speak
in the next room of forms, or format, or the formula
that requires everything to fall into its place

the grass whispers of the betrayal
sometimes romance is a dark plot
the bodies kept in the basement are
disinterred for my humiliation
I see no rules that govern, no sentences
with syntax unbetrayed. no plan for this
survival. we are falling from place

where are my angels?
I see your angels, but where are
my angels this day? where is my peace?
where is the snow that replaces the acid-eating rain?
where is the angel in the yard
her arms swinging into wings
her chicken legs spread wide in welcome
where is the love I fell into
the book claims
no rules. no blame.


As in the previous poem there is a sense working here that is pretty much outside the boundaries of rational discourse. Particularly in this one I can see the emotional elements at work. At war, really. With the intellectual portion of the program. Of course the betrayals spoken of are both Alison's promises to me and my promises to myself. The bodies in the basement refers to the story element in Strange Sins, my reincarnation novel, of finding the mummified corpse of the main character's previous incarnation, Miranda, under the front porch of a house that had been covered with sand at the dunes in Saugatuck, Michigan. I had numerous recurring dreams about Randy's body in the sand and I became frightened of the basement at Scarritt and at Washington, associating them with acts of criminal violence. I believe this poem was written during the period I worked at SIU School of Medicine in the early 1980s, in the records room. Of course the women speaking is always in western literature something of an echo of Eliot in Prufrock. "Fall into place" refers specifically to Ann Beattie's novel, Falling Into Place and once again places the poem in the early 1980s. Becky Bradway brought Beattie to read at the literary festival the year she was grad asst. in literature. I was also a grad asst., but jumped ship after the terrible betrayals and destruction that took place in that department primarily at the behest of Norman Hinton, but with the help of Mike Lennon and Rich Shereikis. Nothing was ever the same after that. I believe they succeeded in totally ruining John Knoepfle, but that is a personal theory which I have no interest in arguing for or against.

kite

my life is turning into a kite
I tie cloth in strips
attached upside good god down
its hallow's eve tonight
this kite is too light
its paper stiff-it regroups in
balsa'ed frame; it does
r's in the sky/u's, 3's
in flightpath, 365 days last year
I flew, straight up into the final
bubble, air dead, flashing through
the paper silhouette.
I feel the grain the paper the wood
turned to stone, ten thousand hours
thick with clotting blood
on the kite's long string
flaking off in pieces
like my eyes undone in the
photograph of her face

1980. The period of time where I attempted to recover from my failed and doomed relationship with BF. I remember those days too well. Sometimes I literally hid myself in a closet in the front part of the apartment on South Grand. My emotional life was truly cruel at the time. I had come to realize that Pat really didn't like my work, the raison for my being there. I knew that Becky Bradway was a seriously fucked up person. I was only too clear about how stupid the relationship with Alison had been. And Alison was carrying on with Tony Kallas and seemed to have abandoned me when I needed her. She did however go out of her way to show me I could still get hard for her, if she wanted me to. I guess that was meant as an act of kindness. Hard to say, really.

einstein's brain

somebody mentioned einstein's brain
too many circus sands
beginning to understand being alone
the r'approchment dimming

so much of this life is in notes
regrets I've had a few
nasal passages permanently clogged
(I am) pouring sugar on the fire

having come home I have proved
there are no safe places
without money I am just tedious
all I dream of is food and sex

what happense when I am old?
courage & self confidence are the big problems
and an inability to bet
that is perhaps genetic

inside of me there are these plaintive sirens
of self pity * possibly hatred—
maybe not/I still believe in Akhnaton
& this memory of myself

there's a roaring good read rattling
these bars but how do I get out
of my own way? Perhaps I won't
then all I can do is gather this thin harvest

Statement from the seventies about my relationship to my work. I know and have always known that I lack the necessary courage to accept the story as flawed, as something finished, or at least something that I have given up on. So today I am many stories that I have not given up on. They live in boxes in my basement and study. BB used to never read a story after it had been published. She couldn't stand the idea that she could fix it, anymore. I understood that perfectly. To this day I think about my unfinished, unpublished novels and wonder why I can't let go of them. I finished Corlyss Disbrow's book, Sensimilla, yesterday, and once again I wonder why I haven't published these books, these old friends, these children. Fear of failure, loss of control. It's been a fucked up life people. No one will ever really know what it was that I was trying to say. Except me.

heart as the arizona

she talks silver threads like ribbons of spit flying
my eyes see golden wires the fine circuitry of a sexual connection
the sky fills with sudden japanese zeroes
their humming cantata of kamikaze intent

the dark mirror shows eyes flecked with blood
the soul sheds tears through the corridor of dreaming
every day fills with the banshees of pearl harbor
surprise pain suicidal love

if hope is a radio white noise is the semen of dreams

This is one of my own favorite pieces, but I know that it appears to be almost entirely opaque. Let me explain a couple of things. The USS Arizona was sunk at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, December 7, 1941. It sank with a good thousand men on board and few if any of them escaped this tomb. There's a memorial in Hawaii, just above the site of the sunken ship. I saw a teleplay in the early sixties based on the idea of a group of men, trapped in one of the compartments, under water, realizing they only had a few hours to live. This kind of thing has always made me for claustrophobic.

This poem refers to the sudden attack on myself by Becky Bradway, that resulted in the end of our fourteen year relationship. Though looking back on it I can see I should have expected it, it took me entirely by surprise. Becky had promised me solemnly when we decided to have a baby that she would never do that to me. But, of course, Becky never kept a single promise she made to me over those years. I don't know why I expected she would keep that one. In any case, with that information in hand I believe this piece opens up into a dark but hopeful flower, resting on the surface of the pacific in the bay at Pearl Harbor.

resistance

there is a moon tonight an accounting a shadowing on this heart
it is you leaving you walking away the steady unhurried natural pace
the moon changes
we dwell in the universe accepting the cycle as inevitable
the engine purrs
I listen too closely
the noise in the darkness: choirs of cicadas the fan beating air out
too many losses
it suggests that loss is the defining characteristic of this existence
why do I kid myself that I can resist this tide?
you're not here
the dark is a vast ovation to the blind god
no happy fortune just breath drawn alone
no twin heartbeat


I will say that this poem is not about any specific romantic attachment, though it did come from a date I had in the mid-90s before I met the woman Kimberly. It is also in the period where I was slipping into the gnostic materials on and off. Any examination of the god of the old testament finds a rotten hideous bastard who gives not a crap about us except insofar as we feed his hideous ego. The gnostics characterized this god as Samael, the blind god. The god who had gone made and created this universe, the one we inhabit. He is, as Phil Dick put it, insane, and therefore this universe is insane. Dick believed that because of this we need "medical attention" and that the avatars, Jesus, Buddha, Asklepios, were all microforms of the true god sent in to bring us back to sanity. It's a lovely theory, really. I spent quite awhile reading the texts and thinking in these terms. But it just didn't really work for me.

And then I truly found the Lady in my heart and in the night sky. On Bryn Mawr Street, after Becky Bradway left me, I started sleeping in the sun room at the back of the house. At night I would open all the blinds, except those on John and Gael's side because they had a little porch light back there. On full moon nights I could see plainly across my backyard and over the fence to tenth street. And I would open myself up to the natural world, the fir trees, the holly tree, the wind through the many windows. In the room in a planter I had this ficus tree I had grown from a tiny plant bought at the grocery store. By this time it had grown to be about eight feet tall. I recommend living with a tree.

In that room I found the Lady for real. And I asked Her the chance to love again. I met Kimb the next January. She changed everything for me. The Lady's mercy is real. There may be a blind god, but he is sad figure if he exists. I feel so bad for all the xtians and jews and muslims. I know what god really is, and She is merciful and beautiful and always on our side. Just look at the leaves and the stones, the waters of the oceans and the rivers, the breath of wind. This world has its own internal reasoning; that is the Lady's mercy.

This poem was also one of many attempts at writing the longer line. I think it works passably well. So much of contemporary voice poetry works on the short line/statement. I love a lot of rock and roll lyrics because of how well they balance their content with their rhythmic needs, and that is primarily short line statements. But, I also truly love both Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, particularly for their long lines.

Answers

What do I want
is it help or assassination?
certainly can't be answers
I've had them
they're like popcorn always
disappearing with the salt

I don't want no phenobarbs
clogging up my clogged up throat
no messy veins slit up a treat
with slick depressing words
in puddles on the floor

I don't want no false hopes
in my prophets no false bottoms
in these boxes I keep taping shut

I don't want no revolutionaries
cutting open my bowels
to prove their fucking truth

I will kill you
I will kill you
I will never write you, never phone
I will not answer the door
I will hide in the attic
I will not see you
I will kill you
and in that dying
I will destroy myself

Sort of a riff on Dorothy Parker's Resume poem. A dismissal of suicide, only to find it in an attempt to get shut of that blonde girl. Well, I was overly dramatic in those days. Probably smoked too many cigarettes. This piece is from 1977, during the period when I removed myself from Alison in an attempt to diminish her importance in my life. I wish I had been stronger and had stayed away from her. It colored far too much of the next decade of my life. Becky Bradway was hard on me, too, but she didn't have talent for the knife that Alison had.

from Outtakes

off on this
morning's El my
last glimpse of
you today/maybe
I'll live through
this afternoon
chasing personal
demons of the kind
that wire you
up/maybe I won't
but I am wired here
and lonely/glimpsing
you/through this
borrowed machine
your hair/spread out
blonde corona/walking
away to the world
which doesn't deserve
to share you

From a series of short poems written in Lincoln Park in the fall of 1973 and mailed to Alison Gaughan. She showed them to Knoepfle and he used them to start his chapbook series, based on money from a donated fund he was able to get out of the university. The poem is one of many poems I wrote to Pat Smith. Although she was thirteen years older than me, with two children and a professor husband (not to mention a professor lover, John Knoll, who was married to her best friend), we seemed to get along quite well. The first several years of our relationship were mainly based on sex. Joel's mother, Becky McGovern, was not very sexual. Or maybe I was very sexual. In any case, Pat had lived with Larry for fourteen years and they hadn't had much sex, and she was not happy about it. So she would be available essentially any time I wanted, and this maintained through most of our relationship. She also was somewhat more adventurous than Becky McGovern, who had pretty strict rules as to what was okay with her.

When I eventually split up with Pat I still slept with her for about another year while living with Bradway. Bradway was not a giving person, shall we say, and getting sex from her was always a certain amount of work. Unless she wanted something from you; then she would do whatever it took to get her way. At least that is how she was with me. Hopefully that has nothing to do with how she is now.

I did love Pat. It was only after I came to understand the contempt she held my work in that I had to separate from her. She loved her vision of me, not the me that actually existed. Maybe that is always the case. Kimberly seems to know the real me, and forgives me that person, and so I trust her more than anyone else.

Heart

this heart is poseidon roaming
turmoiled oceans of other people's lives
trident clutched to a fallow breast

this heart is a wheel turning
on the track of days wearing
its tread away like skin

this heart is a hunter
cross-pollinating the random universe
in search of death and/or resurrection

Nobody really knows.

I hump my pillow in
the empty chamber of this day
trying to discover some reason

but nothing equals nothing
the ratiocination of time
is as close to a true story
as you can get

(and I am)
alone and horny, afraid of love

this guy pain is an omnipresent priest
at the altar of this heart
he waves his hand, requiring my sorrow
he waves his whip, expecting her forgiveness

This poem comes from the years living alone after Becky Bradway abandoned me for her vision of a world without an incestuous father and with a famous and successful poet. I was pretty sad in that time. Having Paige kept me alive. Without her I would certainly have made Becky's first wish, for my suicide, come true.

falling in love badly

the flames ache me, darling
dreams in this memorization, next to you
the lilac dries to shaded paperbits
the air tastes of river in the evening
turns stale with impermanence
you are the cure
the autumn vision
sandalwood in laces
with the cup tipped in the valley
maybe to hold me
maybe to know yourself
the flames chase your patience
with mine, always in error
so far no fatal coals
watching me from deep in
your eyes

It is truly disconcerting to look at these words and recognize the extent I was in love with someone I am now convinced was never in love with me. Of course I feel like a fool, but that is probably the true raison d'etre for love poems. To point out the way that your emotion manipulates your sense of what is true and real. I thought Becky Bradway loved me, at that time. And I had it bad for her, though I doubted her on and off and though she turned her desire for me on and off, like a spigot. I am trying to learn from these pieces.

the season of grass growing backwards

a crude wind singing
a path uncomfortable w/its insects
the woman on the far side of the bed
my forgetfulness
the odd tube dispensing patience
a toothpaste lubricant for the unused mouth
carefully measuring words
as if being were a recipe
her angers are risable, forgivable;
mine are sins, casting me out
a deadly hunger, patient in this season
a wraith in the grass, backward in this memory
silk desires, ascent in the record
"anything"

the season shifts
days, makes barometric
adjustments —balloon acts like a freak,
handles my cares myself, creating
nothing but a quick release
from this ancient electric genius
which has proven to have no intrinsic value
not to my friends, nor even to my lover
her evaluation of me characterized as
"self pity — this is a dumb game. I don't
want to play."

"what can I do?"
"anything. anything you want."

From 1982-83, describing the early arc of my relationship with Becky Bradway. If I had been paying attention, it would always have been clear that she would keep me only as long as I had something she could use. When she began to see my talent as unmarketable, ever the realist, she made plans to move on to someone more successful. The poet laureate, as he would rather I didn't say.

unmarked grave

the things we don't talk about
that are "none of your business"
the unmarked graves in the dark wind
of that bedroom or this
the short sax player in his shower
the trip to chicago with the only boy
the loaded stares at the bar
sitting there with you
everytime the door opened, you checked
the guy you said hurt to fuck
but your notebook said your body
craved him. because he was handsome?
because his cock was big?
sometimes you liked being hurt
but you don't know how to give
so you don't give you don't
know how to lose. How many of the
others did you suck off~hating to
take my prick in your mouth. sitting
naked on the motel bed with Neil
and getting hurt writing him letters
even if you were seeing me. then that mexican
s.o.b., true friend to me the bastard
fucking you in the bed at lennon's
while I was in Wichita, dreaming about
you constantly. I don't know if I
can handle it. It sure isn't even close.
All I can say is
my instincts not to trust you
were right.

losing another lover, 1981

He was lost again, alone
marking his way through the daily deceits,
keeping track~there will be a bill
in heaven and he will just
put it on account. Perhaps
I am sick, he thinks, knowing this
is no relief. He is lost alone
and again he searches
his hands for womb or mouth
to speak or cough some new
life out in this cryptic
torture chamber. You used to
tell me, "anything", whatever else
you used to do.
He kicks the dog across the room.
My errors equal my fears.
You were the silver in the mirror.


This is a poem stemming from my relationship with Becky Bradway. That summer, 1981, I left Pat and started living with Becky, and it was as if everything about our relationship changed, in an instance.

Discovering Your Shape

So the legends recuperate at televised
parties, celestial jokes sprinkling editorials.
So the president pounds on the blackboard
of the world and its canker sores are chalked.
So what, the party asks on the party line,
itself a social act, already arch and feral
in the arch and feral gossip of the pre-war past.

You age ungracefully but with that honest
principia that still chokes me.
I gather up the conversations, hours in the
bedclothes, noting how these muscles
seem enemy tonight~but, but, the moment
asks more. The woman in you cannot
help you anymore than the man in me
can distinguish my confusion.

Some things cannot be changed.
This is the limit of growth~the tree will die
in the garden in the stance it first chose
and the way the world turned it with gravity and wind.
Its wars patient its shapes whatever it has
become~nonetheless, you are beautiful.
I am handsome.

We come to the Tribune over coffee.
Two person telephone
in a world of legendary manice depression,
chalk squealing on a board.
In the background the children hassle
like so many before, just a celebration.

Call me. Tell me what you are doing.

Secondary Selves in Time, 1982

The trash pardoning the flesh
like the boy bowing to his mother
at the dance, "will you know me
when the smoke clears?"
You, broken castanet, rattling diseases
among your bones. Will my death
be just another trump card for you?

The flesh calibrates its meanings
"got a match? a dollar for a sandwich?"
do you have a mouth like a sweet flower?
is my death just an entertainment?
or is it all just another stroke of camera logic,
odds played out for natural rules?
The child in me gestates. Can I question
this reluctance? No telephone in this small room
rings with requests thinly disguised
as questions. No telescope casts shadowed hopes
in polka time on these fishy unborn eyes.
The state enters only on paper.
The priests keep their godly hands out.
No freaking healers from OB
for this cattle. No. This child in me
slips, perhaps, into a warm liquid death.


This poem grows from a poem by Hanrahan which speaks of the child growing in a friend. At the time I wrote this piece Bradway was pregnant, a pregnancy terminated that same fall. I think both of us were more affected by this than either of us admitted. It was, for both of us, the second abortion in our lives. I am very much pro-choice, but let no one be anything other than certain that it is always a serious act, with emotional consequences. I should never have been with this woman. It was a very bad thing for me, for my art, for my life. Yet, there is my remarkable daughter, Paige, who reminds me that this existence is not about the self. It is about all of us in some way or another. I would go through anything for my daughter. For both of my daughters. Even suffer those terrible years again. Thank the Lady for Her mercy. It is truly a gift.

bricks, not so anonymous, 1982

there were satellites
before you were born
there were signals from
thin air & presley in black and white
there was me breathing
unfound carapace soft and jello
in the magnetic fields
the things I didn't know
the things I don't know now
still there were chances
for you, redrafted bird
in my air

***

there are a dozen or so stories
in the first quarter moon of her lovers
and her users and the spoons they ate
from the saxophones, both metal and flesh
the worst in small showers
the night moon of schizophrenia, boredom
wordman clever in his utility freud
working on a failure ~ some nameless
honcho that took her cherry, buried
himself in suicides & her sanguine knots
tangling in these woods ~ I could remember
all this, never even seeing it.
Lindell, and John—your Gino, that
round robin of Mike and Neil and Ron and Ric
and back again to John, jazzboy from
Rosiclaire.

***

so/turn her on the fire
one time turn her
again her flesh seared
by memory, embarrassment
dense and deep in the wild
pragmatism so attractive
and deceptive. So/unmarinated
she is inedible~quiet,
hiding juices~she is restrained
when she should/would be free,
and giddy when she should've
come down from the spit
cleansed by the shadow
of hungers she could not sate
the meat beautiful and passing.


Pieces from the notebooks, 1981-83. This is the early period that I lived with Becky Bradway, breaking up with her, over and over again. To be with BB in those days meant forsaking any frame of reference but her's. You simply could not communicate with her unless you granted her her definitions. I fell in love with her, not just with her writing, which she has often accused me of doing. But I did love her and attempted to give her the opportunities to write that I felt Pat had given me, and that I felt guilty about, having left her (Pat). In any case, those years with Becky saw me write less and less and there was never a question as to who's work was valuable and worth the time and money to support. There are a large number of these poems in the notebooks, that I hope to work with in these next weeks/months. Hopefully there is much that I think is valuable here.