The Chop Shop

TEST

Don't Be A Sheep

Listen to Pop Sheep. They have poetry.

Here's a fun one >> Berio - Thema: Ommagio a Joyce

There Are Whistles and Heat

-- Faye Kicknosway

There are whistles and heat
and the dryer spinning.
Boys, loose from their cloven feet,
remember
to be merciful. No mother
forgives them.
There is half-light
and a half-step.

The republic of gloves?
A knot of appropriate sweat?

Miles of doubt have been left
on doorsteps.
Peek between the venetian blinds
and you'll see it.

How fleshy the moon is,
its testicles, its pianos,
its exaltation.
It smokes at the hip

against a backdrop of banana trees
spilled up
from a page that will,
at some later date, wander

in the company of pigs and sheep.
A good fit
but filled with amnesia
and a wasted life
in the tropics.

Another Celebrity Poet

When a famous singer/songwriter writes a book of poetry, should we care? Should we read it? Say we actually like their music and even consider it, dare I say it, ingenious?

Now it done happened again. Jeff Tweedy, front man for Wilco, has up and published hisself a little chapbook. Honestly. I like what I've read so far. In fact, I wouldn't mind getting this one as a gift. The poems that are on the publisher's site read like song lyrics. These days of severe writer's block have left me desperate. Now I'm thinking that poems that are basically song lyrics can't be all bad. Right?

Teddy Took The "U" In Ardour

(Couldn't duplicate the original's italics and spacing, see Poetry Daily)

Ardor

No wonder ardour couldn't survive
the bullying linguistic fist of the Hero
of the Battle of San Juan Hill,
robust and lusty Theodore Roosevelt,
who also managed, upon becoming
the youngest and most virile President
of a young and expanding country,
to eliminate the u from the scents
of arbour, the necessities of labour
and neighbour, the cacophony of clangour,
the heat of rancour.
O Teddy, burly
bespectacled one, monumentally chiseled
into the granite of the mountainside above
the Badlands, see how the world has grown
harder to command than any Commander-
in-Chief could have imagined a century ago:
no Presidential declaration can alter the facts
of spelling — though it still can delete faces
that leave us with a last short o on their lips.

Roy Jacobstein
The Threepenny Review
Fall 2005
(via Poetry Daily)

What Is A Sevenling?

I just stumbled across this while looking for submission guidelines. It seems interesting and I think it would make a great exercise (via American Poetry Journal).

[. . .] Sevenlings by RODDY LUMSDEN

The sevenling is a poem of seven lines inspired by the form of this much translated short verse by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966).

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

... And he married me.
tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin)

The rules of the sevenling are thus:

The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition. There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, metre or rhyme is desirable. To give the form a recognisable shape, it should be set out in two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh, last line. Titles are not required. A sevenling should be titled Sevenling followed by the first few words in parentheses The tone of the sevenling should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing, giving a feeling that only part of the story is being told. The poem should have a certain ambience which invites guesswork from the reader.
_________________________________________________

Two Sevenlings by Roddy Lumsden

A filthy West End night, the windows wide.
Now she's been gone a month and missed a week
and ached for all day long. Her sister waits:

she flips the Magic 8 Ball, walks in circles,
spreads mushy peas on cold, unbuttered toast
in the kitchenette. The record stops. She shouts,

put on some songs by four black guys in suits.

All those buzzsaw years I ran the show,
all those kids who asked me for advice,
The Architect, the Miraclist, The Man.

The starlets kick-line, that was my concoction,
the sailor boys, the peacock feather spotlights;
till one night in a blackout, I let slip

what it is I say to all the girls. [. . .]

Poetry Publishers Who Accept Email Submissions Updated List

Now hear this: this list has been updated.

I Finally Found It

The fabled list of "must-see" movies that I promised Garth and Anthony so very long ago.

]]> Delicatessen
Hard Core Logo
City of Lost Children
Tales From Gimli Hospital
Saddest Music In The World
Herod’s Law
Bottle Rocket
Rushmore
Royal Tenenbaums
Life Aquatic
Stolen Kisses
Pierrot Le Fou
8 ½
Winter Sleepers
The Princess and the Warrior
CQ
Spirited Away

Suffix

I. Seasonal

I lancet a trench shovel
between the toes of a shrub,
and pace for Dad’s return.
His wife warns me about the other plants
present, and I sidestep in an effort.

I am almost there. With a foot
planted against the wood, it snaps,
splinters frowning progress.
Dad will be back soon.

His backyard is a garden of overgrowth,
creeper vines that look like spearmint leaves, by chance,
and synthetic blue orbs that sickle my face.
The waterfall is limestruck, and plastic turtles,
with large grins and plated fiberglass shells,
bob and haze in windy spring. This green shadow
smirks and thunders its baseness, from the roots up.

Dad went to grab some breakfast
before the 10:30 deadline, his way of thanks.
He shuffled his cigarettes, and shouldered a left arm
full of spiky brambles and cactus fruit.
He almost told me about it.

The roots of this Gila Monster of a bush, moist,
but not drenched, gum the ground, like a newborn
not yet ready to return. It is a common practice this morning,
to trench the perimeter of the monolith.

His wife comes back out to remove a vase
I almost touch. She smiles, gums flapping.
Her breathing machine purrs in the back room.
Her cats are noiseless. They pad up
to the screen door, their tilting ears picking up the sound.

Dad comes back, with a swearing stride
that he would not let his wife near. Picking
up a shovel, he fucks a curse that only
inanimate objects, such as plants, can deal.
He drops his cigarettes lower than the shadow knoll
that I am hopefully choking.

I ease it over and satiate. No time left.
Nearly drowned, we survey the course,
and sift thoughts. We are the same,
even in complexion, but there’s still
stifling roots to extract. Hair, full of
flowers and soil, stick up like a pineapple.
This green beast comes up
every Spring, buried alive, so full of water
it should have been easier to pull.

Nearly there. I pin that motherfucker with a pickaxe,
and hit it between the temples. It grunts and its bones crack,
and I pick it up on faith alone. Dad puts his back into it,
and I hear tendons thrust as we roll it on its belly,
whiter than air, engorged in severed worms.
Dad’s dangling left arm neighbors the pressure.
The blanketed growth we have lifted is thick and retains.

II. Occasionals

On the off-chance are you windfall or dust. Are you
there from time till. You sip and you pine, but you’re there.
You’re no stare at all. You trip on an
invisible rock, and glance again. You date
every nonce, but you do. Your attack

has left; you do that sometimes, too. You make
a prayer, with a thoughtless notion, and you
sprinkle water on your temples, just for fun.

You’re dancing and you are obvious, but only
when moments are.
You fuss and you tumble, in spurts. You pledge allegiance
to your conscience, but only when it notices.
You are defending a you of “me-time.”

You are not always, but only to inside parties.
You are not a catch-phrase, but not a weathervane, either.
You are not a sentence, not a diagram, not
a public speech, either. You are not there’s.

You are also willing to side, but only
with outside parties. You are also drinking
something someone similar somewhere
studied your face about. You are also outspoken,
overshot, and underpaid.

You also
are not humble; you also are not clever.
You are also not also unmanned, a man of inane
action, in minutes meant to mean memoriam,
while managing misconceptions misled by monotones
of middle-aged mono-syllabic moment-catchers
in the minutiae of my momentum, in monologues.

You are certainly not also never not also never also not never that.

And you try. Many times. To get it right. But it doesn’t.
Happen. So what. So you’ll try again. Right. I mean.
This does. Happen. A lot. So what. So what
if it’s not. So what if it’s not in simple steps.
So what if you don’t take breaths. So what if you tried
to quit. So if what you are saying is true, then it
never ends. It never ends. It ne-
ver ends. It never ends.
You never know.

III Condicional

Me di cuenta de mi error cuando saliste

En esperanza de una boda; ¿Qué pensarías?

Si sabrías, tratarías? Si me diste

un momento, solo contigo, podría

convenzer que los ojos cuyos las luces

verdes proyecta velos de mi alma?

Aun tu mamá sé que estos andaluces

de una “rebonita” son mis escamas.

Habrás ganado mucho dinero.

Es la verdad, sino falso. Que mágico

realismo tienes? Un bolero

de tiempo y espacio, eres rico

en tus gestos de expresión, y música

en la voz. ¿Hablarías conmigo

en la lengua qué yo prefiero? Cánteme

Greer Garson

I saw Donald Revell today.
Greer Garson in a bed as a child, washing her bed sheets shot out of the dark clock. Sitting on eggs, teeth on edge, Sal Mineo shoulders Dorothy Wordsworth heating murderous- no, monstrous, erasures like wings on a bicycle that his son owns.
Pandemonium is not the way. Instead, climb into the head of a boy, torn apart by women and wine, and rivers cross you. There is no grey area here. A draining thoughtfulness is all out the pipes, is all out the night, the night itself. Greer Garson is chatted about incessantly on a walk on Walden Pond. My own best friend came over the following day, to talk about, to dream about the envy of my personal erasure.
I laugh and chisel. Arcady, again, in Revell and my life. My adam’s apple bobs in time to the man in front of me, slumped over by the crescent shape of his wife’s berating eyes. Bounce to the woman in the corner, chatty cell-phone catty-eyed dancer that was never there. Bounce to the buoyant blonde behind me; her freckled-lemonade complexion sparkles those whatdyacallit flames framing the outline of a face, placed next to mine in a latticework photo album. Greer Garson had the right idea, the book smarts, the clear-headed sense of the word “expression”. I had bronchitis once, but Garson had pneumonia. That’s “pneumonia” with a “p”.
God save the man not what his utter displaced mutters complain in vain incessantly about, but whether it is in a way. I can’t be as vibrant as Thomas Traherne, or wear purple shirts like Galway Kinnell did, but I can carry a pretty good tune out of sync with God; that, without pride, I can carry a tune, in a way.
Revell carries a torch of limelight that sheds stones on his audience; he reminds me of John Denver and Jesus. My best friend, full of piss and mythology, a bibliophile, a cell biology dissenter, gets the Orpheus Bachhae stuff that we grew up on. What a great day it will be, if we should allow it. My health, like Greer Garson’s, is all shallow breathing and disastrous marriages.

Conversion

What will happen to his image, once he’s gone?
He looks at the stained effigy and wonders.
He taps the window pane and will atone.

His father had dreamed that he would be blessed and done
with the wallflower summer of his youth, but his son defers
what will happen to his image, once he is gone.

He watches the door and aisles with small, numb
digits that preen, that eyeball from outside in slight fervor.
He taps the window pane and will atone.

This mansion dream of God and money, he calls home.
This calling, this wife, this prayer, should come first.
What will happen to his image, once he is gone?

He stands and rises to the pews; a moment
of silence washes over, his mouth pursed.
He taps the window pane and will atone.

Those moons, with divots, in one fell swoon,
They phase over a naked finger that imprints
what will happen to his image, once he is gone.
He taps the window pane and will atone.

prose poem (needs a title, any suggestions?)

A man refused to have his picture taken. He was afraid the film would steal his soul. or re-constitute. Two crayons lay next to the ocean. They are both blue. Everything here has been mass produced. The little hotel in the city with the window open. The fresh cut flowers resemble the silk ones in the photograph of my grandmother, 1948. Standing on top of the mountain, arms stretched to the wind, Buenos Aires. Her parachute did not open, her taxes went unpaid. Re-fun. Deep sea diving her mask filled up with tears. Two years from now she will attend a wedding or a funeral. Her dress will be long and blue. It will drag beneath her feet. I am alone here, so there
are four of us. I try to keep from wanting the morphine. I pray with both hands.

Mon Bon Ami

I have never opened my mouth before
today (why do I look both ways

before crossing the one way river–
running down stream on the

blood of Indians) One man pulled
the lever because the other man did.

Infinite homuncular regress and I cannot stop
exorcizing. He shook uncontrollably

the hand of every man woman and
grandfather clock stopped working

six months after he was born. Infinity
is the opposite of impossible

and both are nothing more
than the ocean opening up.

What Daedalus Began We Have Tried To Finish

A seaplane leaves the river
and I am awestruck
by its amphibious ways.
It seems so strange
to build anything with
such intent. A human
contrivance of sky and water
rising towards clouds, also sky and water.
Invisible thread pulls it aloft as two geese
protest the noise saying, watch us and see
how it is done.

Navigation

for KC

Emboldened hands roam the skin’s languid map
and chart the naked lanes contained between
neck, breast and belly. Magnetic bodies careen
towards each other, their oblong orbits snap
into place. Sunlight is skewed to a stop.
The day’s colour rises from sleep and streams
like pale ink from window to door. Unseen
fingers, cunning beneath the sheets, go tap,
tap, tap at the trailhead then softly track
a path along your spine. We fall forward
through these long minutes, our small weariness
enclosed in the heart’s geologic ache.
Gravity pulls sleepily at our torpid blood;
the slow earth seems to turn a little less.