Monday, February 28, 2011

A Lucky Night

















bcpa    2.28.2011

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Saturday, February 19, 2011











climbing
          upright in trees

      with her hands and feet


                 binoculae facing
a far wide horizon

rains dry         fruits wither
    she descends
                 

         to stand

                      animal and  wolf

Friday, February 18, 2011













talking to myself for decades
maybe im talking to my nephew
who was born today
and will not know me now
eight and a half pounds
nicholson haircut
elfin chin
pissed off nose
whose heart got up
to leave
before scheduled
to catch up
to two blondes

attention sweets and fun
richer than ever
better lookin
than a boy should be
will they push him farther away
smoke the mirrors
or slip a chance
to figure it out
through denial

so back to chrysolas
braving tomorrow
with a suggestion
life can be a boat
steer where you can
enjoy the view

desperately

remember
were all here

Monday, February 14, 2011


as we learn more
perhaps human
is overbroad
hu for soul
man for animal
maybe homo
dewey coded with options
sapiens sapiens
or camel leather

















he curled the wheel to the right
and the roadster shuddered most softly
as its bumper hit the rail
the tail lifted peacefully
behind and fell forward
89 miles an hour
grace in a second
vision and arms out
over the teal below

common empiricist

that instant when jack heard a tickle a snap to his right
before the sweet cherry red mind
split from his ears for TV and the future

the america dream didn't perish then
until the term. of lee

london  95

Saturday, February 12, 2011

djuna and james










And then one day I came to Paris.

Sitting in the café of the Deux Majots,
that faces the little church of St. Germain des Pres,
I saw approaching out of the fog and damp,
a tall man, with head slightly lifted
and slightly turned, giving to the wind
an orderly distemper of red and black hair,
which descended sharply into
a scant wedge on an outthrust chin.

He wore a blue grey coat,
too young it seemed,
partly because he had thrust
its gathers behind him,
partly because the belt which circled it
lay two full inches above the hips.

He sat down opposite me, ordered
a white wine and began talking at once.
"The pity is the public will demand
and find a moral in my book--
or worse they may take it in some more serious way,
and on the honour of a gentleman,
there is not one single serious line in it."

There was silence. His hands
peculiarly limp in the introductory
shake and peculiarly pulpy,
running into a thickness
that the base gave no hint of,
lay, one on the stem of the glass,
the other, forgotten, palm out,
on the most delightful waistcoat,
purple with alternate doe and  dog heads.
The does, tiny scarlet tongues
hanging out over blond lower lips,
downed in a light wool,
and the dogs no more ferocious
or on the scent than any good master
who adheres to his master through
the seven cycles of change.

He smiled, "Made by the hand
of my grandmother for the first hunt
of the season".  He lit a cigar.

"All great talkers have spoken
in the language of Sterne, Swift,
or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde.
He studied the Restoration through
a microscope in the morning and
repeated it through a telescope
in the evening.

In Ulysses, "They are all there,
the great talkers, them and the things
they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded
simultaneously what a man says sees thinks
and what such seeing thinking saying does
to what you Freudians call the subconscious,--
but as for psychoanalysis its neither more nor less
than blackmail."

People say of him that he looks both sad and tired.
It is the sadness of a man who has procured some
medieval permission to sorrow out of one time
and in no place;
the weariness of one self-subjected to the creation of
an over abundance in the limited.

If I were asked what seemed to be the most
characteristic pose of James Joyce I should
say that of the head; turned farther away
than disgust and not so far as death,
for the turn of displeasure is not so complete,
yet the only thing at all like it, is the look in the throat
of a stricken animal.

Think of him as a heavy man yet thin,
drinking a thin cool wine with lips
almost hidden in his high narrow head,
or smoking the eternal cigar,
held slightly above shoulder level
and never moved until consumed.

We have talked of rivers
and of religion
of the instinctive genius of the church
which chose for the singing of its hymns
the voice without overtones
the voice of the eunuch.

We have talked of women,
he seems a bit disinterested.
Were I vain I should say
he is afraid of them but
I am certain he is only
a little skeptical of their existence.
We have talked of Ibsen, Stringberg,
Shakespeare: "Hamlet is a great play
written from the standpoint of the ghost."
Strindberg: "No drama behind the hysterical raving."

We have talked of death, of rats
of horses, the sea;
languages, climates and offerings,
of artists and Ireland.
"The Irish are people who
will never have leaders
for at the great moment they always
desert them.  They have produced
one skeleton---Parnell--never a man.

Joyce has few friends.
Callers have often found him
writing into the night, or drinking
tea with his wife Nora.  I myself
once came upon him as he lay
full length on his stomach poring
over a valise full of notes
taken in his youth for Ulysses.

Once he was reading out of the  book
of saints(he is never without it)
and muttering to himself that his day's saint,
"A devil of a fellow for bringing on the rain,
and we wanting to go for a stroll."

He described Stephen Daedalus
"Alone, not only separate from all others,
but to have not even one friend," stating
"I will not serve that which I no longer believe,
whether it will call itself my home,
my fatherland, or my church:
and I will try to express myself
in my art as I can, using for defense
the only arms I allow myself to use,
silence, exile and cunning."


Friday, February 11, 2011

130
I hear the train
all my life
night and me
within 2 miles
2 in the morning
but there's no
continuity
unlike bells
on sunday
 
 

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Sunday, February 6, 2011


















Erik Satie was born at Honfleur and  received his first music lessons from a local organistIn 1879  he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was  labeled untalented and lazy and his piano technique critiqued  as "insignificant , laborious and worthless".
In 1887 he left home for Montmartre and  became friends  with the poet Patrice Contamine  and Claude Debussy .


 















Playing piano in cabaret theatres he started publishing his GymnopĂ©dies.  







 By 1891 he was the official composer and chapel-master for a Rosicrucian following.
In1892 he stopped using barlines and  devised a compositional system for music. Scores of his compositions  were covered with written remarks which were often read out during performances.  
In 1893  an  affair  began with model and artist Suzanne Valadon.  


















After their first night together he proposed marriage  but Valadon moved to a room next door at the Rue Cortot.  



















Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui,(goatling)and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet".
During their relationship Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a kind of prayer for  peace of mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie. After six months she moved away, leaving him broken-hearted and  left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".  This was his only intimate relationship.
He met the young Maurice Ravel  and founded the Metropolitan Church of Art of the Leading Christ. As its only member he composed a Grande messe , and wrote a flood of letters, articles and pamphlets in support of the church.  H e applied for membership to the AcadĂ©mie Française twice, writing that the board (presided  over by Saint-SaĂ«ns) owed him membership.
 In 1895 he inherited money, allowing him to print more writings and to change from wearing a priestlike habit to being the "Velvet Gentleman".
















But  by 1896 all his money had vanished and he  moved to cheaper and smaller lodgings. He became a member of a radical socialist party and in a filing cabinet  kept a collection of imaginary buildings made out of metal which he drew on little cards.  He would publish announcements in local journals, offering the buildings,  a"castle in lead" for rent.

















He wrote for Vanity Fair in the 20's and after years of heavy drinking died in1925 from cirrhosis .   No one had entered his room since he had moved 27 years earlier. His friends discovered compositions  behind the piano and in velvet suits which included the Vexations, Geneviève de Brabant, The Dreamy Fish, and  a set of "canine" piano pieces.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

notions























the wake called for great effort
patient endless revision
without a hint of polish
like burroughs
around the camp fire
half true routines

a speaker like twain
who let you in on it
the next night

unnecessary dramas
infinite reaches for allusion
sneering with grace
or if not for what?
greek soliloquy
trianon arias
allusions ad absurdum
shoulders above fiction

a sitting book
to swim with words
the wake
wont let you speak

recline and the words
move of their own
toward your understanding
without need
to get it all
beginnegan




Thursday, February 3, 2011





























he slammed the metal door
      you will live for ten to twelve hours
      as your body slowly bakes
      it is far worse than
      burning to death
      becoming a slow
      inevitable chemical reaction

      you will begin to feel
     it in fifteen minutes
     it was your fault
     remember that