My Thoughts At The Irish Poets Reading

• Holee shit, the microphone looks like the tip of a finger on a black cord. Or a penis.
• The emcee says "MmmmmmMmm" instead of "ahem".
• What if I laugh? I won't stop. Why drunk. Oh god why forty minutes of being drunk.
• He speaks so quickly, so fast, so so fucking fast. Hilarious, he stumbles once but so fast. Too fast. Can I handle this?
• I have to read read or keep writing because I might loose it. He's only the first reader, Can I do this? Let's pay attention and see? Or am I too scared? Of course, drunken laughter. Watch out.
• My breath is dead. So stale in my mouth.
• Oh dad, I'm dancing. No, no, I'm dancing.
• Outside is really black. Really, being trully, or truly or the spelling of that. But not the spelling of that. We know spelling doesn't matter-- comprehension remains without spelling and what matters when the sillhouette of trees shines, or the window lighted up behind the trees shines on their silhouette. Is the reason for the shadows and I -- in the lighted room across.
• I have to pee.
• I have to brush my teeth.
• Can I keep this up for another hour? I might run out of ink. Out of paper. Out of words. I might die.
• Cameron writes sense. I know he can handle, can pay attention, to this. He looks, avid, absorbed, ignoring, biting nails. I write feverishly. I lick my lips to wet them. Breathe to clean my breath. He knows how good the last/the first poet was/is. I applaud. I write nonsense.
• A new poet. I have to pee.
• He has funny hair. It's dryness pulls it up, off his high forehead like he pulled up with his fingers and it froze there. Floating, in vertical planes off his head.
• Can I listen? I will listen.
• BLÁH BLÁH, BLÁH BLÁH, BLÁH BLÀH.
• One word, one word, some words.
• I may die. I may pee my pants.
• Black moth, white butterfly, oh, form a cup, that I may pee freely.
• His poetry is too slow for my thoughts to flow. And the pressure in my bladder is growing so that it becomes more difficult to think and write, as I focus on the fullness behind my belly
• Can I read? I may read or reread.
• When he's finished, I will go. Slowly walk to the door, exit, quiet, go through the stone hallways, find the wooden door, sit down after unbuttoning my pants, and pee blissfully pee. Yes, it's like a treasure.
• To Cameron:

I have to pee, I'm going.

When he's finished, I'm going.

• I did it. The women's restroom was breathless and eerie. Eerie and breathless.
• She, this one, is Norwegian, and plays the fiddle. I can listen. I am light.
• No, no, no. The man, the hair is talking explaining again. I grow tired. There are deliberate pauses. I may still, loose my composure. Silence, what are you thinking? Does Cameron care? He breathes a laugh. If he looses it -- I am done. Oh done. I may be done already. You are interesting man, this poetry, this crazy pause. I do not know what you are doing.
• What are you doing?
• Shhh, I will bring you in my home, lay you down. Do not talk. I will cover you with a blanket. I will cover your face with a blanket. Do not talk anymore. Lay, with this blue softness over you. Blue that will look black in the dark. Your children of slaves, of hard labor, put them to rest. I will cover you. Will take your breath.
• I am captured by my physical sensations. I want food.
• Tear. It's not the tear. It's the hot, swelling, burning behind your eyes. Or that sour fire in your stomach that threatens your throat with madness.
• Be still and play the fiddle.
• Her voice is so heavy, so full of 's'.
• We're almost done. My breath is hot. The air outside, cold.
• If this chair lost the strength, to hold my weight. I would fall back, and lay there, until it was time to get up.
• This poetry reading. The beer. Your birthday. Happy Birthday.
• I heard it too -- that secret sound that mimicked his snap. It is why I love you.
  Go-ing, looks like going, like goying!
• Going. It is over. We are going. (I have to pee again. It's been ten minutes. No more.) I like his poetry, the first one, the last one.

Red.

Bones.

Land of Beer and Accordions

Sometimes things just express themselves better in video.
Old videos.
Of when you were in Amsterdam drinking beer.
And sometimes those videos look like low budget commercials that were not edited even a little bit.
And sometimes they come out nice.

Amsterdam

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Dream Poetry

I wrote a perfect poem in my dream.

I wish I could remember it.

In the shower this morning the first line came clearly, and I asked for a pen and paper and scribbled it down against the wall where wet drops ate away at the paper.

I stood in a parabola of light.
I was in the garage with my father, with whom I have an awkward relationship. I wasn't actually in the garage, because I was in a writing room with Robert Hass and Melanie Abrams, but the poem took place in the garage and so I could see the action playing across the page like a projected movie.

His blue eyes were glossy and welled up behind his glasses like a fishbowl.

I think that I read this somewhere and I remember debating about whether or not to put it in my poem, since it wasn't mine, and did, so I could remember the sentiment.

He was sad about my leaving to go to college, which was when the awkward turn in our relationship happened. He said something so perfectly encompassing the change and the sentiment without being obvious, but that was either unimagined or forgotten.

I thank the room.

I Also Create Magnificent Works of Art

"The Jimmy Street Tangle"
or
"The Bird That Flew Too High"

Plastic birds on pipe cleaner
Jessica Cox 2007

I Didn't Drop By to Say Hello

On Sunday Milke Thompson walked over to the Bart station, entered the train and sat down. He read a newspaper in a top hat. People looked at him funny because of the top hat. And the cane, and the purple chiffon gown he wore on Sundays. Milke liked to put yellow crepe paper in a duffel bag and walk about the station outside with the yellow bits of paper poking out. He said he liked canaries. The blue lockers were on the left of the ticket machines and he would stand there with the paper until the train rumbled overhead. Calmly, he would purchase a muffin from the vendor on the sidewalk, and slowly unwrap the chocolate Costco muffin from its saran wrap coating. After the train departed, he would move toward the escalator leaning heavily on his cane, tapping the ground twice with the metal end before shifting his left foot in front of the right. Milke Thompson is a millionaire. And he spends his Sundays thus, in an endless repetition of crepe paper and chocolate muffins.

I Enjoy a Nice Cup of Coffee Now and Then

Of course it started small, and ended in an explosion of fury and humiliation. But perhaps I go too far.

This morning of Tuesday last, after falling asleep while my professor read Chaucer, I and my friend Amelia go over to Peets for a nice cup of coffee. Now I've worked with coffee for quite some time, and I should know. But I drank a small iced drink before lunch and then everything in me started buzzing and jiggling and moving about. You know that coffee shake that's become so stereotypical, now merely an exaggeration to pretend you're all jacked up. It happens. To me.

So my head's getting all twisted while I'm sitting through Archaeology and my teacher's a freaking nut case and says, "uuummmmm, oo-oohhppss...did I say that? ho ho, no sir, giggle, mhmmmm" all in one go and I'm really just trying to read Faulkner's monolithic sentences and I have to sit on my hands they're shaking so bad.

I was the first one out of the door the minute she trailed off her theatrical expose....and in the cafeteria searching through the glass doors for something that would help. Like a plug in the bathtub I hit upon an orange vitamin water -- B relaxed, or something like that. Yes, yes, thank god, just drink it drink it drinkit and stop stop beating

In my short story class I'm the only person that knows what they're doing. But that's unfair, 'cause there are a few, but let's just say I'm the most outspoken. And this is where it hits. The culmination of energy packets firing in my synapses until it feels like head is going to explode and there will be nothing left but bees.

She, my teacher, compatriot, asks this question: "And has anyone read Faulkner before?"

Harry Potter raised his hand, The Sound and the Fury, of course of course it's sitting on my wall at home. And ye gods, through the will of it's own my hand creeps up to the top of the desk in some sort of Buddha gesture declaring peace peace! We will not have peace! The synapses shout and as she was giving up, as she was giving up! She spotted my hand and looked through her bangs down out through her nose and said, 'Oh, yes?"

"Um, Landing something, or something Landing; it was his first published story."

This is a lie.

It's weird to not leave things as they could stand, and to instead make up a lie that has no reason or motive or that can get you any further in anything positive. And you just feel the falseness of it, and though no one of course could know, or care, you hear it screaming again and again, liar liar! You know They hear it, in the way the professor turns away from you with a catch in her throat and an "oh" because who cares. And you're terrified, and maybe you should just never come back because you know the hollowness of it, and the stiff unnatural sounds in your mouth will expose you and then they will know that you're full of shit.

But it's important somehow, to prove to these people that I'm smarter than them, more worthy of an English class than these sad fucks; to show my superiority over those who think niggard is a racial slur.

Am I overreacting?