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wGo Ahead, Patronize Me |
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Poems 2020-2099 are waiting for sponsors at $10 a pop
Want to hear more? Email me at millionpoems at jordandavis dot com.
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wThe Show -- Season Three |
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Season three info, including college tour dates, coming soon...
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wPlig Bong |
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(* = pinged in last 12 hrs)
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wMonday, February 25, 2008 |
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2020
WORLD HAPPINESS DANCE / SISTER THE JOISTS
The daylight is looking forward to getting away
From this question mark customer.
In the split-level beer and spice place
The characteristic feeling changes
Every couple of feet, here curry here fenugreek,
Dried lemons... I have power,
I am a powerful man. Where I ask for licorice,
Three weeks later licorice appears. Root.
I sit inside as the daylight
Hangs out with people playing music in the park.
I play music too: I have Ornette yodeling through my cortex,
Must I be bereft of radiation?
A billion people in Canada,
All of them eating Canadian food.
*
I put on the cd of a friend,
I have no cd of my own,
What would I put on it, Betty Barclay
Singing I'm a Big Girl Now probably.
It is Christmas in January,
In February, I like this put on
Of the universe singing
In the waves, the waves are the singing,
The plaster is cracked at the ceiling
And the joints of the walls,
It is time to sister the joists,
To spackle and repaint
And box up all the artillery
Of the finders burrowing
Deeper into the mud than the groove.
I am lucky to get to like you.
(This poem sponsored in part by a grant from Samuel Amadon.)
posted by
Jordan #
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wFriday, August 31, 2007 |
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2018
BLACK MATH
At the movies it's only love
Shining through the dust, all moo
For the band called The Jokes
Playing in between scenes of lava flowing.
I'm sorting out the wraparound
For a frienemy in a dramedy,
And what you know is what I heard,
A name made in finest countdowns,
A difference from the where-to-begin
Of library ladders, not that big of a deal
For the parka people rocking
The have a good one into oblivion.
Who are those people, and where was I
When they sent home the flier
With the offer to become one
With the peergroup or the universe,
Whichever go along to get along
The weather wants to word as winter.
I'll watch myself persist in reading
This indifference as a sign.
On the chalkboard of the cinema
The long s (not summation)
Indicates limits beyond sex,
Beyond death, even beyond
The expectations of family --
That is, the imagination. If you've seen
Out your front door in the morning
How many trucks it takes
To film four minutes of network tv,
And if you've ever served on a committee...
It's hard work to be clear.
The car chase lasts eight years.
posted by
Jordan #
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w |
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2013
That Would Be A Great Poem If You Cut the Crappy Parts
God I love your poems, what you're doing
You are on to something completely original
And yet reassuringly familiar, emotionally anyway
I know it's the hardest thing in the world
To know when you're on or not
Everybody from Kant to Paul Valery to Phyllis Diller says so
Look, here's my card, I do a little private consulting
It's not very svengali or master-slave it's
Let's just say I come from the land of Rent Control
What I didn't have to give a landlord I paid in dues
And I think I can show you, I'm not criticizing but
Did you notice when you looked up those two times
That glassy look on the handful of people
Who weren't averting their gaze from your radiance?
There are a few places where, relatively speaking,
You're phoning it in -- don't worry, your B game
Is so much better than everybody else's A game
Nobody noticed. Not yet, anyway. You're good.
You're really good. That poem is good, it's amazing,
The long one with all the images of Brooklyn
Train travel and the back and forth with your friends.
It would be a great poem if you cut the crappy parts.
I hate to drop that on you and run but EastEnders
Is coming on in exactly the time it takes me to walk home
And I haven't missed an episode in twenty years --
Do you have a VCR? You'd love it. Talk to you. Great job.
II.
Here's the deal: Your poem goes on too long.
We're not talking Seventies-German-Cinema too long,
It's more 'wtf dude we're your friends.'
Really.
I know this is just a listserv,
And I know how many sets of air quotes have accreted around *not ok*
But this text has a funny way of showing up in print
*EXACTLY* as it appears in the electrons.
If I don't say something now,
That's what they call *tacit approval.*
Which I do not want you to think I'm giving.
Your poem goes on too long.
It would be a great poem if you cut the crappy parts.
It is clear that you don't know which parts those are.
It's also clear that if I tell you you will hate me.
Can you feel the suckage?
My parents tricked me into a Dar Williams concert
And it would have been ok, at least as much fun
As the very best of Fresh Air with Terri Gross
If she had stopped *talking* between songs
And played maybe twenty fewer
And if the twelve songs she did play
Varied somewhat more in melody, structure, tone, and point.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from an anonymous donor.]
posted by
Jordan #
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w |
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2012
THAT'S FUNNY, YOU DON'T LOOK AVANT-GARDE
You look like a bank clerk
Like a university professor
Like a meteorologist
You look like a Speed Racer fanatic
Like a stay-at-home dad
Like Jeff Daniels' stunt double
You look like a wall of books
You look like a can of beans
You look like a benefit of doubt
You look like this guy at the library
Who snort-laughed whenever I checked out Khlebnikov
Which reminds me, I don't look avant-garde either
No hat no pince-nez no theodolite no chignon
No cape with giant embroidered labia
No pennyfarthing three wheeler no lobster-powered surrey
You're this guy with a computer who writes things
While maintaining an absolutely conventional job family home and a car
A car! You have a car!
You have a car
Which burns gasoline
In its conventional engine.
In the real world this kind of going along to get along,
Resourcefulness and a persistent presence of mind
Which for all manner of arbitrary financial emotional reasons
Means taking advantage of petroleum-powered combustion engines...
In the real world having a car
Is a form of power
That makes life as we know it possible.
In poetryland, everyone knows how little we know of life
And therefore how changeable our conditions may prove,
And as far as that goes that's all right
But oh in poetryland a little learning is all you get,
And the science section.
In poetryland, where everyone is presumed guilty
Until proven a blameless perfect orchid of unending delight
Which happens to like two people every hundred years
For the duration of twenty to a hundred and eight lines,
Having a car invalidates your right to imagine
Being governed by your peers, people
Who read and write books and don't actually play golf
Or own voting machine companies.
In poetryland the loudest voices end up in the newspapers
And the quietest ones schedule the trade presses.
In poetryland as anywhere else in America
If you work and work your native humiliation
You too can be a great humiliator,
A superfund site of the soul.
You don't have to be rich.
You don't have to be cool (god no).
You certainly don't have to know anything
(You certainly don't).
Elvis misquoted Shakespeare,
But he omitted the attribution.
Stop worrying about everyone else,
About me, about the internet,
Which poets' cookies have all the chocolate chips.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Just shut up and stop it.
Give me one line
That's not a ferrofluid grenade
To remind me what your permawar's for.
I'll be over here
Next to this eight-foot wet paper bag I've closed you in
With a pencil
Waiting for you to write your way out.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from a donor in Kansas.]
posted by
Jordan #
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w |
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2011
What's In National Poetry Month For Me?
I'm tired of being the guy
Who goes to work in a tie every morning
Letting all the people who don't share my skin color know
"Sorry, Charlie! Gentrification a-comin'!"
And I'm tired of poetry events with eight people in the audience,
Tired of poetry books with four poems worth reading in them,
Tired of all the readings, books, and journals
That exist mainly to tell us how tired of everything all the famous
poets are.
But I'm tired above all else of American politics and its one lesson:
Look out for number one. Case in point:
What's in National Poetry Month for me?
What are these interminable group readings,
These commemorative posters, these e-mail bombardments
Supposed to do for the poetry that makes *my* balls tighten?
Poetry that is as *there*
As this war
And this economy
And these governments,
Zombie poetry? Pirate poetry?
Ninja poetry?
Coffee bacon donut poetry?
Is there a single poem published in America since the war began,
And I'm not counting Chicks Dig War and I Loved My Father
Which being laser beams of death to indifference
Can hardly be counted as poems, but is there any American poem
Again I'm not thinking of PoemFone or Folly or Deer Head Terrorist
Snake Penises
any poem as
Dark Brandon Neo-Benshi Sockittoya Gods All Suck Real Americans
satisfyingly greasy as a donut?
Again not speaking of Mainstream Poetry Dickinson Ghostbrain Good One
murderous as a stealth swordsman
didn't think so.
And this poem is just as lame as the others,
And I don't even have google as an excuse
Its lameness is my lameness
Which is legion even in the land of lame-os poetryland has turned into
Having actually always already been that hello Larry Fagin hello David
Lehman
Hello Oscar Williams hello Fitz-Greene Halleck!
Poetryland has always been a blotter
For number-one-or-nothingism
And an incomprehensible annihilating resentment
Which is general among all who dare stray there,
Who dares imagine to make something out of nothing but words.
National Poetry Month, you hold up an enormous magnifying mirror
To these symptom-ravaged faces
And encourage more smiling and polite applause
And I admire your sense of humor
But all the same, fuck off.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from the Helena Rubenstein Foundation.]
posted by
Jordan #
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2009
Your Gods All Suck
I have worn your fezzes and your burqas and your yamulkes and your mitres
I have stood in your temples and your mosques and your synagogues and your cathedrals
Your oracles and your rec rooms and your board rooms and your bar rooms
I have studied in your upper rooms and sat on the floors of your fellowship halls
And rolled twenty-sided dice, listened to organ music, come abruptly and after a glorious duration
And I've read your poems and I've bullshitted with your dads and missed trains
To hear the ends of your graduation speeches with their quirky ice- breaking openers
And I have walked your dogs and listened to your secrets and taken your drugs
And tried your recipes and borrowed your shampoos and edited your articles
I've followed your blogs obsessively and donated blood and felt smug along with you
And felt smug without you and reasoned with your cynicism and felt desperately alone
Whenever you have revealed your absolute otherness which exists permanently
In these gods you unpack from your upbringing, your education, your stance
Vis a vis the slate layer cake of class, these gods who save you from anxiety
By delivering you in middle age to a mindless repetition which is not poetry and is not life
And which leads you always to fear, blind rage, and isolation, and leads me too,
Because your gods all suck, every last one leaves you spent and pale and not saying thank you,
Not feeling the motorcycle throbbing under your ass, not rolling into a tree the snow
Crinkling on your corduroys, not looking straight at the asshole that shits another year
Of incomprehension onto the lilies, not staying where we stand, but agreeing
To be destroyed, agreeing to pretend to reject everything but a champagne lollipop
Distributed by aspiring actors freezing in canyons, to reject happy senselessness
And senseless happiness and bonkers the camerata in its metronomic swingings
Of the bows of agreeing, even music even the way is a god that sucks, even the wrong word,
The pot and the poetry there are no hot hands there is no always-on. Suck suck suck
Not you not me your gods my gods these prolegs belief adheres to our spines
God almighty the suction the straightaway lying of checklists and watchtowers
And photographs by Marion Ettlinger, voting machines and neural plasticity,
There is no avoiding how bad your porn sucks, how little you know what you want of love,
And vice versa it of you, how every note of Chopin chisels a concordance in the basalt
That is devotion to a flower and a hive and the odds of finding royal jelly
And surviving the duel of the nurselings, your independence sucks, and your satire,
Every means to preserving an equidistant parody of fellow-feeling, pussy gods
And especially the mothergod pitying the undying crap of what fails to study,
Learning is a crap god, a Vishnu of because-I-said-so, and reason is a bullshit god,
Just as opposing reason is the eternal sucka, the ever-advancing army mistaking its iPod
For body armor and its heavy artillery for an explanation, and repetition is a fucked god,
A fucked god, a fucked god, repetition is a fucked god leaking poetry,
And everyone who reads this sura will continue to cling to theirfucked gods,
But there is no god who monopolizes love, and there is no love that anxiety cannot trouble,
And eventually and permanently there is at least five degrees above absolute zero of love
Everywhere except on earth where we keep seeking some evidence
That the larger part of the universe wants even more than we do to be pushed around
And to find these ghosts we make a colder space than has ever vibrated
Inside a water heater underground in Minnesota.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from an anonymous donor.]
posted by
Jordan #
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wThursday, March 22, 2007 |
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2008
INTUITIVELY, after reading Larry Joseph
Would I recognize a new Terry Southern if he or she were to materialize,
I drink so much celery tonic the seas look like green fields
And the development of toxic cleanup sites into homes for the beautiful
Is a subject aching for the Julia Roberts treatment
But I am not aching, I am nodding politely
As the row of nesting dolls from John Berendt to Henry James
Tell me what I am missing existing among the brand names
Of ludicrous abject pixie mercator projections
Sunlight sincerely ice water for the heels all bankshot
Diggity, do you want to know more about industry types
Or give it up for the music control gang suds, and if you say
It depends on the industry you get four more years of modish politesse
Oh exhale for the criminal rage pimentos
Crying out for olive-complected neighborhood armada
(In this case a couple dozen motorboats and an ex-tugboat captain
Weighing in at 320 lbs, worth a bag of rubies and pfft)
Or don't exhale, like I care how you crumble your adult life
Into the fizz, I have my own waking dreams of exercise
To paste up in the bean formica carburetor Rauschenbergismo
That in its sad lack of a patent bad boy imprimatur
Will have to wait its turn by the carousel
For a cameo, and meanwhile arousal
You are waiting and I am typing this as the files wash in.
It's just like us. We want to run straight into it.
posted by
Jordan #
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wFriday, March 16, 2007 |
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2007
AS IT HAPPENS
Some mornings the science
Section has nothing to steal
But does that make me
A vivisectionist by default?
No way, Desiree.
Not that I'm trying to persuade you
Or ever could, the bomb squad's
Sirens tut-tutting as they doppler
The pre-dawn. Dawn.
I said pre-dawn, you dirty girl.
*
Deep in the ganache
The pressure's practically nucleic
And what stipples the questionnaire
Can't be reduced to incompetence
But rather is the inexorable product
Of Inexorable Products, Incorporated.
I don't doubt for a second either
The permanence of this lush vegetation
And that makes me what, exactly.
Exactly.
*
The pie is in the safe
And misery's blessing
The same comfy policeman
Who noted our presence
Among the ghosts of the piazza.
*
The photographer in love with his subject,
Oil stains on coverlets
Even descriptions of the land
Onion prose.
For whom all this showing off
When every day ends
In communion with the spirit
Of the marriage?
When the wife begins to vibrate
Put her ankle to your ear.
The thought in isolation
Stylish in its weather Rome
But carried to a tune,
It floats on the darkroom page --
Fit in your head and become an action.
*
The keys have ribbons
And phone cord wristbands,
Ordinary leaves
Pressed in a domesday boke
Don't think less of this afterlife.
*
I prefer wombat to capybara but oh
To be the scarf
Our syllabary spazzes over,
A dreamlife reciprocity
Cannons recognize...
They gather by the recycling
To take in the sounds
Of the love-off.
We play the piano taking turns,
Then crash chords our together,
Your peanut butter in my benadryl,
Like bacon for Frenchness,
A patio under the stereo
For the gathered souls
To revel in their timely guesses.
It will happen,
It is happening,
And as it happens
I enjoy nothing so much
As waiting for you to see it.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from an anonymous donor.]
posted by
Jordan #
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wFriday, December 01, 2006 |
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2006
KEEP THE DRUMS AT YOUR MOM'S
The first rule is do no harm.
This turns out to be difficult.
Orange oil trebuchet'd over the top of the cubicle.
I am staring at a lump of clay shaped like a fathead fish.
The prism on my desk, my fake industry award,
Sends its seam on a lucite diagonal.
If I were to teach middle school math
I'd want to review my proofs.
The stack of trimmed letterhead doesn't light up to see me,
Doesn't it know I'm an addict?
If you want to use ProTools on me,
If you want to Photoshop my face, I'm ready.
"Unknown number" keeps flashing on my phone.
The white bird steps sideways in the melt.
Someone sends me a hate search.
The sleep of a barmaid is white as a robot
And all the perimeter's a butterfly bush;
I huddle under the lilacs.
Impossible for an individual and yet
Now come the stray billion diatoms carving out prime numbers in the slush.
The horse song which is a veto of all that is probable
On the left edge of the reading room,
The song of no experience, comes for the pale tray --
It takes a button from my coat and measures it in farads.
A tree street bends in its matching shifts
Intimating nothing but slavery and pendulums,
A rocking in the hips and overexposed film.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from Mary Biddinger]
posted by
Jordan #
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wWednesday, August 16, 2006 |
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2005
HOUSE MADE DOWN
Remember this, from computers past?
I likened the starlight
To what we pieced together
From the maelstrom of urgent warnings.
You stretched out
And I was grateful for consciousness,
That your shaking out the lactic acid
Could set my chemicals in motion
Despite everything in waking life
Blinking like a dashboard light,
Or rather because --
"Everybody's got a bomb, we could all die
Any day!" And we took as much time
To locate what I'll call
"Our contact lenses"
As we felt like. You felt like
A young animal. I feel like
A malted. I feel, when we're together,
Which really ought to be all the time,
That the long run in which everyone
Understands is actually imminent,
Not decades off, not made of foam pellets
Or requiring UPC symbols
Or the final class upheaval.
Come here, now,
Let's rocket offstage
And if we're not oblivious
To the awkwardness around us
We will be.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from Drew Gardner]
posted by
Jordan #
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wThursday, July 27, 2006 |
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2003 / 2004
A MILLION RANDOM DIGITS
Almost surely nothing up my sleeve.
Nothing like a sleeve, for that matter.
No story, no instant winner, no glade
Where the traditional "elk dance"
Precedes the coronation of the flower king
And the dukes and duchesses of the forest,
No bindi manufacturer, no waterslide,
No ack ack, no Brest-Litovsk accords
And certainly no infinite monkeys
The book of only numbers
Is remarkable for its persistence
And stylishness -- five by five
Albers Reinhardt Mondrian Martin
Have we seriously considered the grid.
Have I seen you carrying your plate
Across the grassy sunlit field, stopping
Abruptly and then, a moment later,
Changing direction. No time for sergeants.
The pretend family. Pleasure
In the long run. Well. I've seen you
Spot me across the park. I've seen
You learn a complex polyrhythm, tapping
On the drayage. I have seen you naked
And have talked when saying nothing
Would have been at least as fitting,
The gibberish my neurons found meet
To haul into the light received by you
With generosity. Lomography.
Captivity narratives, earned run averages.
The walls of the underpass mosaicked
The cornsweet illusion.
Tomorrow red groovie screamed mega,
Einstein didn't fuss much with his hair,
Contrast and compare starvation builds
Character, race is not a factor,
And there were sunshowers and sparklers
Caving in the parking lot.
The light on my chipmunk garden
But these are voicemails
When what I want what you want
Is a few wrongs amended
With decimal points curving
Making knock-knock jokes watermelons
The jacknifed tractor trailer
Scatters on the off-ramp,
The woman across the car gums
Her lips, squints closely
At the tables and charts
In this month's Lotto News.
Who's going to tell her
They call that game a "math tax."
The first recorded lottery
Paid for the Great Wall of China.
We were praying in the desert
When the meteor shower
Struck the enemy camp.
None of that. A tub of hot sauce.
An encounter with Human Resources.
Numbers are not letters, not words,
Irony is not chance. To speak
To each plant in a loving voice.
Who wants to know if we revise?
Tell them every single night.
Tell them carbon dioxide, tell them
Waves of light, of water, of sound.
Tell them I'm feeling lucky,
Repeated strings appear then
A story is the intersection of
Permanence and unpredictability.
The book of random numbers
Allows us to conduct these tests
And all things being equal
See consistent results, a cup
Of tea, an Enigma machine;
And when I'm able to breathe,
All reverting to the mean,
They'll run a Monte Carlo simulation
So I can step out for a smoke break.
When I see you, I'll cross against the light.
*
100,000 NORMAL DEVIATES
star Rare bald ibis
wants rented room
Ahmed told Press.
Maroc aisne Mario smash Stage bresil lorraine
Awesome Landis takes Tour
Rome Stockholm Sydney Tokyo
controls. function tune orders.
Summary Dec Material contained herein peer reflect
LSD PCP
inodes
Tuhy:
docs targets. PentiumM
vote counting deceitful Theatres Weekend:
Property FreedomIt occurred circle Peres thought Syria Rabin.
informed proceed completes
Symantec critiques security
handson breakdown
dealers location
Extended voltages permanent
Gates
intervene Bid quash
[These poems were funded in part by a grant from Daniel Nester]
posted by
Jordan #
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wTuesday, July 11, 2006 |
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2002
NIGHTMUTE, OR THE STOWAWAY
I got to talking
To the unregistered passenger
About the Beatles. He was a bit
Of a musicologist.
He liked the drones
And the diminished elevenths,
The fur and the claw.
We scanned to port for dolphins.
We were waiting for a feeling
Neither of us knew,
A measuring tape stretching
From the gun mentioned in act one
To the dramaturg
Flirting with the sound effect girl.
I had to laugh when she said
Her name was Constance Garnett --
"Where do I know you from
And while you're here,
What's with all the extra code
In the genome."
Wish you were here.
*
Cucumber spirits.
This love feels like
Sunlight shimmering
On a goldfish pond:
"Buy a lottery ticket, mack,"
Says the Attorney General.
This boat, on the other hand --
What can I tell you,
What what what.
And there on my pantsleg,
A deertick. Perhaps
You think something
A little untoward.
The coast of Alaska is longer
Than the American Atlantic.
The caribou feel their way
Through the flies, as
Even in high school, Fred Grandy
Knew where to find Camp David.
Thinking of you.
*
The nights are getting...
Well, last night I could swear
I heard a tape gun
Unspool enough adhesive
For a thriving cottage industry.
Either that or someone
Snuck a cat into steerage.
*
The people in the story were correct
To ignore the jar
In every frame of the film;
Burgundy rocks
Sparkling on the cliff.
I should have said
I was a researcher,
A volunteer strawberry
On community service.
Instead I told
A truth of sorts --
"I'm a location scout."
Keep the covers warm
And a pillow cool.
*
We say "in a manner of speaking"
When dissembling.
Such were my thoughts
As I entered the casino.
Though Gauss never toyed
With numerology,
O game of pure randomness,
My friend played red
Then black
Each time I spun.
Eight spins later,
Neighbors and orphans
Gathered round,
The stowaway suggested
I do the math.
I began to feel
My bearings.
Counting the days.
*
Up in the theater
Rehearsals of Vanya
Proceeded apace.
I had a reading
Scheduled for that night,
The travel poems
Of Wallace Stevens.
When we think of Florida,
Of taking the train,
We must also think
Of the Connecticut River.
The reading
Was sparsely attended.
Distracted, I chewed
A sprig of parsley.
At the reception,
A gentleman-historian
And the stowaway
Spoke at length
Of great disasters at sea.
I regretted soberly
My principles.
Here you were wished.
*
Notice how long John Lennon sings
The first word in
"I Should Have Known Better"?
When I'm with you
I feel almost
Like an object.
This is a much better feeling
Than I had supposed.
I could be round as a hill
On a hill. I could be
A shot in the street.
A radio sending out
Strong signals and weak.
You would love the light.
*
Turns out his name
Is Newtown. He caught up to me
At midnight, eager to share
His first law of literary conversation:
Every thing mentioned
Must concur. Or, There is a use
That does not go out.
I wondered if it were Greenland
We were gliding past, and not
Nightmute.
You know how distracted I get
Away from you even ten hours.
It is a comfort to know
You have the code and the rebus,
But my patience for the mail
Is a thousand miles behind.
Constance, at least,
Seems genuinely enthralled.
She and Newtown can be heard
Laughing through the tiny night.
Yours.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from C. Dale Young]
posted by
Jordan #
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wWednesday, June 21, 2006 |
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2001
AREA Q
We'll be together someday soon;
Compare See you tomorrow! I pack my bag,
Set the alarm, stare at the ceiling til morning.
Walk into the street and a seed sprouts.
Belief on the face like the name on a bus:
Across the street seven strangers face south.
How people used to wait: As prepositions --
Behind the control gate, down the penstock --
And then another part of speech, eventually
Eventually eventually spinning the turbine,
A stick out your tongue attention I thought
Only existed in the clinic. The doctor
Walks by an open door. The selectric
Continues its tattoo. When children sleep
A bird stands in the library parking lot
Pushing from its diaphragm Not yet not yet,
The excitement transmitting
To every window's potential greenhouse --
An ivy tendril waves, grips the brick
A foot away. Your call is important to us.
Factors that extend subjective time:
Having nothing to do, uncertainty,
No explanation, a sense of injustice,
Being alone -- tomorrow's central planners
Visit this mock theme park to study
Reactions to environments controlled
To avert anxiety, or as may be, accentuate it.
[This poem was funded in part by a grant from Chris Sullivan]
posted by
Jordan #
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