This was taken at a Telepoetics event back in '94...

the room was dark, the crickets were loud.
the moon slivered through heavy curtains.
she finger danced absently through my hair,
blew smoke rings at the ceiling.
she had more than enough experience
and infinite patience.
she had nipples that whispered forbidden wants;
i stroked the pale buds and answered,
warm breath on cool flesh.
her fingers closed on my tangled head,
pulled gently back to expose the neck
and sank the sweet fangs in,
penetrating just enough for a sip
as her other hand slid down,
wrapped itself around me.


squeezed.

Another cool shot from the Telepoetics shindig...

this isn't a memorial - he doesn't need one
from this necking in the woods;
did we do as much for Mitch Wojtycki,
for Jim Cummings,
for Frank Bonomo,
for Tom Luplow,
for Sam Blechman,
for Bobo (Oscar Brown III),
for Betsy Hammond,
for 'Righteous' Bob Rudnick,
for Rich Calish,
for Lorrie Jackson...
for unknown scribes who will always be virgin poets,
whose voices dropped dead,
who became suit-wearing ciphers became cogs became their parents....
in this burg we partake of his last breath and belch,
let 12-year-olds speak his blasphemy
speak their own truth....
we turn off commercials where new cars
sell themselves to bongo beat,
we make our own rude noise,
wave our damn dirty sheets to the wind.
we move on.
we move on.

In '95 & '96 I worked as a bike messenger downtown...

ate a little pavement on Clark during rush hour
but so what;
road rash is part of the job
as well as the high-noon swagger
that comes from running with Mack Trucks,
all to deliver occasional plot twists
and crucial evidence for office intrigues.
it's just a job.
four days a week.

left the party at dawn. could still see stars.
riding the watermelon line with no clear destination
and could just as easily have been on the Streetcar named Desire,
rumbling past diaspora landmarks,
the pure essence of the place
helping me conjure as i write.
it's been said Chicago and New Orleans shares an undertow,
ancient waters full of voices come and gone like shadows;
i hear you, whispers riding the music.
i hear you.

Taken during Around the Coyote '97 at Pontiac Cafe, with Harold Jones on sax...

(1920's to 2001)


this is a poem for the dead, for empty shells
reclaimed by commerce more often than decay....
(The Black Cat; O'Toole's; The Get Me High; Adolph's; Batteries Not Included;
Cafe Aroma; The Y-Not; The Wholesome Roc; School Street Cafe; Edge of the Lookingglass)
on well-worn streets i'm a gyspy passing cold campsites.
sometimes i don't realize i've shuffled by and backtrack,
other times i don't even stop;
how often do you look in through dead facades
for the smoke rising from phantom cigarettes,
the wandering muse leaning against a shadow jukebox, grumbling....
(Guild Books; The Underground Wonderbar; Lower Links [1]; Jimo's; The Celebrity Club;
Citi Lit Books; Kill The Poets; The Gallery Cabaret; Prism Gallery, in Evanston)
i ask myself if cubic space is ever blessed
by our first and last breath -
are we self-important enough for ruins or retrospectives....
hell no - this ain't the coast:
this is a still a cowtown, convention playground,
city of blue collars and rednecks;
no room here for a funky valhalla.
(The Borderline; Too Far West; Crash Palace; Spices; The Cotton Club; Sweet Alice;
Dejoie's; Lower Links [2]; Splinter Group; McCabes; Chris' Grill; The Stepping Stone)
this half-assed memorial needs some elegaic prose:
we bend the dimensions of tight rooms and bars for the sake of words,
fusing the ancient and the unknown with syllabes, grunts, whispers,
like griots and troubadors before us,
for they are us and we are them.
(PuddinHead Books; Yak, in Hyde Pk.; The Wolcott Inn; Pangea; The Hothouse[1];
The Bop Shop [1]; 10-56; Cafe Amoré; Urbus Orbis; Club Equinox; The Mutiny;
Augenblick; The Logan Beach Cafe)
you know, this can't be a poem for the dead,
not even a lament for the forsaken -
we take back our anecdotes, our ashtrays and liquor,
our lies and dreams;
we haven't the gestalt to spare
on a future real estate office, or a Starbucks....
we almost forget to pause to mourn our own -
voices forever stilled.
(YoMama's; La Piazza; Pontiac Produce; 34th St. Cafe; The New Harlem Theatre;
Estelle's; Izzo's Artery; Roby's; No Exit; Literary Explosions; Big Horse;
Subterranean[1]; Louie's Pub; The Woodlawn Tap[1]; MadBar; The Hungry Brain; Cafe Gourmand)
this is a poem for tomorrow, where memories belong,
and if we're half as bold as we claim,
this poem will always need to be continued....

Taken at Kill The Poets back in '92...






[The following poems came from the year 2000 poem-a-week project "The 2K Book"...]




2.1/2.3

there's nothing wrong with
celebrating the night,
creating primordial fire after dark,
collecting it in our fingers
our mouths our hips,
pushing through to bliss
as shadows grow heavy
and smiles go unseen,
leaving trails of warm moist devotion,
gentle as lava.
there's nothing wrong with
letting go of the world
until nothing else remains
but the music of breathing
and slow hands...
behind a blanket of city snow
we lay in blue-blackness,
night and skin in rapture, in rhythm;
the streetlight outside's gone dead,
pinstripes of blue light
from the pale satellite
replace amber tones
playing on shoulders,
on hands clutching ankles, thighs,
catching beads of sweat
before darkness claims them,
catching the palm of your hand
as it awaits a kiss.






3.3

Christian tv
with the 'Pax' face lifted
still stinks of final solutions,
still decides
who is human, who is sub-human,
still defines the bounds of love
and control...
still declares that
sometimes
God does make junk.






4.4

vertical bantustands
crumble in panoramic splendor
before the spreading tide
of neat suburbanized plots
along the facelifted
watermelon line,
my rolling gaze
caught by the perfect arc
of a battered dirt brown b-ball
launched from thin dark hands
half-court
as the pre-dusk rolls in...






6.1

the world inside a child's mind
is more spectacular
than any
sugar drenched
frenetic montage
of hard sell neomythology
ladled with care and irony
by the powers that creep;






6.4


i'm a holy fool,
that's the way it is -
i giggle in public,
suffer fools,
show my unmanly face,
i laugh at my own mistakes,
i wander the battlefields without armor.
my untraumatized outer child pushes away
apocalyptic revenge fantasies
even as slings and arrows find a home
in emotional flesh.
i'm a holy fool,
intentionally misunderstood
and talked to like a dumbass...
i have no choice;
i will not swagger
with cojones-sized chips
on my pissed-on shoulders,
quiver filled with
preserved and rehearsed acid comebacks
for the next assured insult.
i'm a holy fool,
avatar from an enlightened limbo,
stranded on a planet full of
headhunters
and i won't blend in...






9.4

no. 1 makes demands
because she knows her ass is sweet;
no. 2 makes concessions
because she admits she needs instruction;
no. 3 makes allowances
because our time is always short...
no. 4 desires family gossip
to bridge a personal chasm;
no. 5 isn't sure what she wants,
she keeps escaping and sneaking back;
no. 6 pretends she doesn't anticipate
smoothly arranged phone sex...
no. 7 wants plotted certainty
to fight off creeping middle age;
no. 8 needs the illusion of commitment
to patch cracks in worn armor;
no. 9 is a misanthrope seeking adulation
to cloud her slide into exile...
no. 10 smiles to herself
as we lay in sated silence;
all she wants is discretion.






11.1

i feel it coming and its only Sunday -
the curtain closing on the long running act
and catching fire,
the vibe of resignation and surrender
shadowing furtive faces of conceded fate;
i hear it in the brooding desperate laments
of homeless
voteless
weary black men
making subway riders uneasy;
i can't escape it
in the smirks of smug indifference,
of tolerance wrapped in contempt,
of enlightened greed, part III...
maybe it's only fear
masquerading as premonition...
Monday brings the greenhouse winter whirlwind
along with monsoons in the UK -
the last torrent of propaganda
from all sides domestic;
Monday night
i stand in chilly rain
waving Nader signs with friends
and radicals,
standing at six corners
in front of the latest festering gestating Starbucks.
cops drive past
leaning on their horns with thumbs up.
yeah, right...
first thing Tuesday morning
i stagger to the polls.
inside the booth
i recall the dark Reagan night,
the further gloom of Papa Smurf Bush,
the regularity of spiritual assualt,
the promise of new righteous banality
weighed against monolith demands
from Jesse Sr. & Jr.,
weighed against time honored
donkey seduction and dismissal...
i cast my lot with the Greens
and step outside
to see if pigs fly...
the long night becomes melodrama,
climax on hold...
and holding...predictions retracted. twice.
and holding...concessions retracted.
and pending...
the day after, isn't.
the other shoe is still in the air.
we're all bystanders
hostages
in limbo,
hurling invective across divides,
floundering inside
painfully applied quantum civics...
on Thursday, we watch
lawyer-ball played in Florida;
nobody gets the happy ending
we've been raised to expect
and closure withdrawl is setting in...
on Friday the radicals get their
monkeywrench in the machinery -
sit-ins and street theater,
Wall Street strapping on Depends,
a presumptive transition team
locking horns with voter lawsuits,
Cuba offering neutral observers
to assist democracy...
on Saturday i've had enough -
James Baker invades my cartoon time
with threats to escalate the monkeyshines.
let him.
this is the result i wanted:
a ball and chain to hobble
whoever wins,
TweeddleGore or TweeddleBush,
a leash on machinations,
a Washington standoff.
the application of the cliche
'be careful what you wish for...'

but we don't have a victor, yet.
and the campaign continues.






11.3

if
i could be an extemporaneous tree
what tree would i ...be...

i will never be a tree;
i will float,
flow around bent limbs
to honor those lynched
for entertainment...
i will never throw down roots
where history is edited,
where the ground bleeds and won't stop
because duty demands...
i will never stand at attention,
make myself a target of principle,
a more conscienscious martyr...
i will be a blur, an afterthought, a virus,
an echo of insinuated
heresy
from a drunken deity,
inseminated through ears
absorbed through skin,
leaving no marks
no shadow
to betray me,
nothing to be separated
ground up, processed,
made to serve egos and
agendas.
nothing left to rot.
nothing left for platitudes
and crocodile tears...

i will never be a tree;
i will be
an implication...






12.3

time to confess.
time for truth.
time to face the doppelganger;
the portrait of the writer who doesn't write.
more ambition, less envy,
more sweat, less working slob mise en scene...
time to stop hiding in the mishigoss
of a normal life,
time to slay the fat dragon that sits on my chest
pins me to the chair
and whispers in my ear:
"give me next week's poem,
give me a book chapter, a character twist
and I'll give you hours of
bullshit fantasy and corporate dogma,
gossip and hyperreality,
keep changing channels -
you can tap that brainstorm tomorrow..."
time for truth,
time to let go of the truth of old loves,
lost loves,
time to reach back for the holiness of first love,
of indecision,
of adrenalin pumping in the face of mystery,
of childhood wonder and the possibility
of all things...
more ambition, less envy;
time to stop coy flirtations with fate,
waiting for starmakers and the topless muse
to ride over the hill
to save my ass from safe obscurity...
time for truth -
time to stop appearing just to be seen,
expecting applause and a wreath of laurels;
remember Bukowski's damnation of the
thin pretention of accepted writers,
the life sucking trap of
fame, parties, and self-belief...
heed the loss of editorial control
that money brings...
forget the chase for posterity,
for royalty checks and
a wicked culture hero rep;
do the damn work!
do the damn work!
do the damn work!

throw a rag over the tv
turn on the record player
and tell posterity to kiss your ass.