The August Project 2019
by David A. Kirschenbaum and Christina Strong

first poem each day is by David.
second poem each day is by Christina.


August 1, 2019

one of my favorite recent pictures taken with my folks,
in the 6B garden in the east village,
july 28, 2007.
i'm pretty sure the picture was taken by matt roth,
major matt mason usa,
we were curating a reading and music series for the second year in a row,
garden party,
in the garden next door to his and nan's building on suffolk street,
but we were locked out of it that day so had to move the reading.
matt figured on 6b,
so my folks and i drove over there.
as part of the reading i interviewed them about growing up on the lower east side,
and they told their stories of their neighborhood in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s to my friends.
as a new element to that reading series
we would have the readers turn music from the musicians into poems
and the musicians turn poems by the readers into songs.
that day i read my gilmore girls project for the second time
and casey holford and preston spurlock reinterpreted some of my poems as songs,
debuting as gilmore boys.
one of my favorite days.

----------------

driving around in San Francisco listening to Green Day in one moment

and having the Vietnam war end in the second but play back because I wasn't there at the first time, The helicopters, the black helicopters

I do know what it's like to:

appreciate the shadows

use a rotary phone

how is it to know beauty when you see it

A color or black-and-white photo of a roll of sunflowers in a field

explain how some faces are bad and some are not
 places vases vices

I used to think I was born into another family until my father said I was dropped on the marble staircase

in fourth grade they seem particularly cruel

it's why I get the creamy of the soft serve places

they asked for a chin up and I gave them a mouthful

you have to not kill yourself even so they say that worst thing about you

I do miss the old New York


August 2, 2019

driving around with my folks yesterday,
after getting apple pies from the drive-through at burger king,
dad likes them better than the ones at mcdonald's,
where we're going for the 99-cent, any-size coffee and soda,
two decafs for them and two diet cokes, no ice, for me,
and there's traffic on long beach road,
so i take the back streets through oceanside to mcdonald's.

outside of a nearby church
there's a teenage girl,
with flowers on her backpack,
waiting for the traffic to halt so she can cross the street
i come to a stop, wave her on,
and she waves me back to keep going,
so i do.

that's how people get themselves killed, my dad says,
they acknowledge a wave from a car on one side of the street,
but don't look at the other side of the street
and get smacked into by a car,
that's what happened to me, i reminded him,
when i got hit by that car a few weeks before 11th grade.

------------

The frame room where everything else is pegged

ambulances emergency theater
bright lights overhead

The x-rays, The "if I took Latin or Greek" in school

I would know what some of this stuff means



August 3, 2019

back when i lived in my studio over on west 24th street,
i got a bunch of stuff framed, all at once.

i used a frame shop in my neighborhood on 9th between 22nd and 23rd
to frame a d.a. levy lives print that i found at a fair connected to the nyu beat generation conference back in 1994,
and they were real artisanal,
like a hundred bucks artisanal.

and then i found my framing place,
over on 6th avenue and like 18th,
one of those places that sells postcards of paris in the front and then does framing in the back,

so i brought a bunch of stuff there to get framed,
some booglit covers,
the boog powell card that inspired the name of the press,
a flyer rachel aydt did for a reading i had with katie yates back in 1992,
some lenny bruce postcards,
a nude anne waldman postcard advertising a reading of hers in the early seventies,
an o'keeffe i picked up at her retrospective at the met back in '86 or '87,
and, get this,
this place delivers.

and they delivered to me on west 24th street
and then i could never be bothered to hang anything up,
and i moved from there in 2002,
and a year later, before a boog event in my apartment,
my roommate daniel said if you want i can hang all of these up,
and he hung all of them up,
including some steve keene paintings done on wood from freight boxes,
and they all rest in the same places today.

----------------

why is
or is
a wet pavement in manhattan
any different than any other town

the ambulance, the drug overdose

another mass shooting

capital punishment

but you are correct, there shd be more art on the walls

pictures of clouds or people
before the sadness creeps in


August 4, 2019

my friend philip asked "you watchin' the mets game?"
nah, i said, dvr'ing it.
a short while later he calls back,
a few minutes in he mentions the game is a blowout,
i put it on to discover its the mets who are doing the punishing,
9-0 in the sixth,
i start it from the beginning to witness it all.

----------

when I realized baseball wasn't baseball

The many times I had to go to my uncle's
house with my younger brother to socialize
and by this meaning listening to baseball
on the radio in the background of everything
and many times I brought a book to read
instead of play with my cousins
bc for the most part I got the "shhhh,
she's reading" as in: "she's doing something,
she's busy reading" as if and was reading
"doing something important"
until some parent, adult, decided I needed
to play baseball with my cousins and brother
but their yard was small, so no cutthroat
tactics
and yes I did not want to play, get hit
by a ball, whack myself with the bat,
but I did finally understand why the adults
pushed me, it's all to test your hand eye
coordination, and practice,
you divorce the sport.



August 5, 2019

when i was a little kid,
maybe six or so,
my dad taught me how to catch a baseball,
you take your left hand,
the one with the glove on it,
extend it away from your body,
and catch the ball when it comes to you, he said,
so i reached my arm away from my body,
glove extended to catch the oncoming throw,
when my dad threw the ball,
and i kept it there as the ball was coming closer and closer to me
until the ball hit me square in the face.

-----------------

he said he was afraid to get on the bed
photos of people smoking in bars
nostalgia for tiff


August 6, 2019

my mom asked if i made my bed
i said i never do,
she said but you have to,
it's what you're supposed to do.

--------------

where was the danger

headed towards even, not away

sometimes you can hear the air ripple, the something of all bombs

war reenactors what is the glory in it


August 7, 2019

in a dream violently confronted this poet
who had ghosted me years back
after we were really good friends,
woke up, and figured i'd stop complaining about him liking stuff of mine on facebook,
and finally unfriended him.

---------------

Friends, woke up, and figured stop complaining about alternate sand pavement cinders
broken flowers spectrum in a dream violently confronted this off is the cutting him
liking stuff, and finally, sometimes we were really good hardest part.
Poet who had ghosted me years back after, did not get to tell them I saw pink hibiscus
and the straight jacket hold. Is this the necessary evil we all need?


August 8, 2019

my mom keeps making sure i have friends,
after i hang up phone calls asking
"who was that?"
and i say it was wanda or philip or ian or sean,
and she gets assured that i'm okay because i have friends.

--------------

Would you talk to a friend about life. Thrown into the deep end of the evil passions,
sometimes there is music on purpose to prove what a long way down is. The white noise
makes switching over property and pressed him, talked about compassion. Depart by the...
the still window (see one) to uproot the tribalism distorts the sense of empathy
A particular sun set, the elemental precepts, more secure and stretch the capacities
of rational happiness, donation to yourself nothing can be said, raining the days
of mixed tapes shall melt with fervent heat…


August 9, 2019

throw out old videotapes by the dozen
while cleaning my parents' house,
we don't play them anymore,
discard unopened tdk d90s,
no cassette player anywhere,
the mantra is just save pictures and old movies,
rediscovering my family through each snapshot.

-----------------

maybe there are some people who like to clean
latex turns them on, for some reason
they like their fingers to sweat, on their
hands and knees, moral and pious to porcelain
buoyed by the stream of cancerous scents,
if that is a thing, but it is, a fetish
or can we thank our x century novelists
like anthony trollope or even better, jane
austen, the minute details of painting
a scene, some maid dusting a windowsill,
someone courageous enough to get on a ladder
but artists don't paint too many portraits
of the workers, except when they're exploiting them
The scorpion is a metaphor, the objects
you find while vacuuming behind the couch
The quarter you could have used last week
You say: I could clean on a rainy day
but you don't but there is that one person,
spotless, pristine, erasing history
erasing the libraries of the world and all
that inhabit them


August 10, 2019

dear stubhub,

i could have used that met ticket you took away from me,
i mean, i liked watching into the spiderverse with ian on my folks big screen,
and then eating some cheese ravioli with garlic bread,
light on the garlic, light on the oil (they got it right),
and i did get to see the end of the met game on the tv,
but dear stubhub,
i could have used that met ticket you took away from me,
you sort of soured me on you stubhub,
i hope we make this right somehow you and i,
i do.

----------------------

my favorite concert was My Bloody Valentine and ultra vivid scene and I shd be dead a million times over. during the golden years we used to sleep out for tickets, Front row center for somebody. The amounts of gas we would spend on traveling, The times before coffee became a rage, specialized, even


August 11, 2019

i've had a crush on her for years
wondering if i have a crush on her because i have a crush on her
or because i need to have a crush on someone
and she is it
i saw her for the first time in a while today
i was looking to put dings in my crush of her
but my crush for her is ding proof.

----------------

every crush is unrequited
each wish unfulfilled
it is that ring you drop
by accident at the lake
you never return to again


August 12, 2019

i wish you were the you you were,
but i really like the way you are,
because i like it
and because you are,
that's all.

-----------------

study in pink

Who are the tyrants?
Begin by rejecting all authority
The man who played you
Enough torture for one day
Without the fear to justify
Marks they leave
Nothing remains unfit for our consumption
See the woman, and her master, there.
Its claws and ivory chip teeth
Subject-object is this
A cult melody

It's not the unreal real
Extreme background of memory the prosaic and sordid
King of intangible domains
How to account. Refuse for it.
Something in addition, that other answer
Their dual-purpose


August 13, 2019

i can't remember when
i last tried
to make someone feel so bad
unreal oh, so real
i can't imagine what's going inside of you,
i'm asked not to cut you off,
thinking about it makes me feel so glad, so bad
it's hard to remember when you were nice
we've had one good conversation in 10 years,
don't think about it,
easier that way

------------

our notions of love
our whole idea
of pure, romantic
or familial
ideals have been
turned into
an unappetizing
meat sauce
which is of course
non kosher
and is so laden
with cancerous byproducts
we have forgotten
how to read
wordsworth anymore
and shakespeare is "that guy"
who wrote love sonnets
that you might remember
his classics include:
summer's day (hello
global warming) or
someone's eyes are nothing
like the sun
or they are something
like the sun or the smog
that once made all
our eyes beautiful
in the sixteen
and seventeen hundreds
but now, looking through
the din of
name your irritant here
a thousand los angeles
a thousand earth quakes


August 14, 2019

my friend bruce teichman and i bought
32 tickets for springsteen's born in the usa tour at giants stadium,
eight for us and our friends,
24 to sell at $75 a piece,
and they all went easy,
it was my summer job in 1985.
i tried it again on my own,
sting's nothing like the sun tour,
to bad results,
trading one pair for a few haircuts from my stylist.

----------------

my father made me memorize the world atlas we owned
which was published in 1963 and some of the countries
that are in this atlas do not exist anymore.
There will be subsequent generations of people
who have never heard of Rhodesia.
My mother took me to the planetarium
but it was my father who was good at math.
I can still do long division up to a certain point.
It says that you can think in the abstract
and that you don't belong at the Mary Kay party.
1985 dripped with irony, from the 1630s to now: we must conform.
There is not enough oil or coal to set the rivers on fire.
We want to gaslight everything. you will continue to throw
your plastics in the garbage. You will continue to think
that separating everything is confusing.
Your offspring will not know what green glass is.
All we will know is an endless cold war
while the soot from burning waste falls from the sky.


August 15, 2019

at the kitchen table growing up,
whenever the conversation would turn to something that we wanted to know more about,
my dad would get up
and go to my room,
grab the appropriate letter of the world book,
a set of which my mom had earned by selling them door-to-door to other people,
and then read the entry to us all.

--------------------------

hate the grateful dead

i've named the skunk around the house George I don't care what gender or sex it is. my grandmother kept a scrapbook of dead people and I know a lot of them in it. I want to track down the reason why my father's family was so abusive. I do want to know why people hate gay people, Gay means happy and this is what they hate.
how can anyone hate a flower.
it's like hitting a hibiscus or end and 30 a.m.

but maybe it's the penis/stamen shape of the flower

sometimes it's not man that is the problem but power itself

my whole life has been putting up with mean girls

sometimes I feel bad for being more well read than my mother

nobody counts Adam Lance's mother as one of the victims

people have a lack of understanding of how mothers can be so cruel

it's totally acceptable that a father can be cruel, it's written in stone

whoever edits Wikipedia pages doesn't actually know about material comforts.

does this mean that you don't have a phone because your father didn't pay the phone bill?

Life became a good idea when I realized it was not good to wear a hoodie with headphones on

The generation of head shops and vintage dresses. The generation of get the fuck out of the house don't come back till suppertime.

I have actually stolen a boat and I could tell you that it sinks.

in Hawaii I realized I could be raped be in and left for dead and stuffed in the lava tube for months and no one would know

Emily Carr had an orangutan called Woo that she would go into the forest with, and paint


August 16, 2019

the problem is i'm supposed to go to boston in four hours,
i'm going to this poetry festival,
something i've wanted to do for years,
but i've had trouble leaving my apartment,
no less crossing state lines,
so no boston for me,
but i mentioned this to my therapist a few months back,
and we made it a goal to for me to go to boston,
so i change the date for a boog event i'd scheduled during the festival,
and e-mailed one of the bookers, suzanne, who's working with me on my boog fest right now,
and said hey listen i had trouble getting out of the house to get to the festival
and i'd really like to go this year if you could invite me again,
and she told me they planned on inviting me,
so a while later i got the invite and accepted the invite,
and set up a ride with Sean,
who's picking me up in four hours,
and i still have to shower and pack,
but there's a free hbo trial this weekend and the veronica mars movie is on in half an hour or so,
and for some reason my dvr is labeling it as a non-recordable channel,
so everything's stopping here until that movie's over around seven,
and i'm getting some meds delivered from cvs between four and eight,
so i can't be in the shower for when they come,
and this takes me to about a quarter of seven,
leaving me a little over an hour,
depending on how late Sean has to work on this american life tonight,
to pack and eat between now and the end of veronica mars
and hopefully the scrips come by then too,
then all i'll have to do is shower in the seven to eight window,
maybe i'll even have time to watch tmz and baseball night in new york,
i'm going to boston in four hours and i'm a little scared,
but i don't think it's going to be a problem.

------------------------------

In Vermont you can't get banh mi sandwiches
or maybe you can. In some small village
off the highway, a paved road, to a dirt
road to a paved road again, some woman
is slicing bread and adding pickled daikon
to pulled pork, you ask for hot sauce
bc you think Vermonters don't use
hot sauce, or it scares them, change that is,
a sandwich that doesn't have maple syrup
added, or quinoa, or hippie hummus
or a microbrew IPA or a hemp product.
You sit on the bus going to Boston, thinking
of what you will eat. You think of things
you can't easily get in Vermont, like a garden
eggplant, or daikon. You get off the bus
and walk to Chinatown, roasted chickens
hang off hooks in the front store windows,
red bean pastry, bubble tea. You get a
sandwich and walk to Comm Ave, sit on a
bench and wait for your friend to show
up. You eat your sandwich, wondering if
you'd want to live in Boston again, you
can now buy marijuana in Brookline or novelty cookies
from the Korean market. You can visit
the murals at the BPL or Buckminster Fuller
at the Mount Auburn Cemetery whenever you want.
But then you remember that it's expensive,
the thousands of college kids, naive
and loud and drunk, the men who cat call
you as you're riding your bike around
town. You think: men in Vermont don't
cat call, maybe they don't know how,
maybe they are too busy driving on a
dirt road with dust flying everywhere.
Maybe Vermonters would rather go to bed
early, or those with porches sit outside
during the summer looking at the night
sky. You don't know what you want to eat,
you're just guessing, you're hungry
and now overwhelmed by the noise
and when friends ask you how Vermont is,
you say: it's quiet and I can see the stars.


August 17, 2019

boston's a big city to a new yorker who doesn't leave their apartment much.

i don't know if you'd call it a featured slot when you're 1 of 125 reading for 8 minutes each at the annual boston poetry marathon,
but it's the longest reading i've given since the three minutes at the alternative new year's day event seven months back,
and i split those three ways with the wilders,
there's always some nerves before, hell, during, a reading,
but it was nice to be up there again,
nice to be in such a warm room,
nice to share the stage with my frequent collaborator and dear friend sean cole,
the two best parts of this trip were meeting john mulrooney's wife rachel
and car trips back and forth to boston with sean,
even when his front driver's side tire blew and and we ended up getting into somerville at 3:30 on saturday morning
even better than my frequent 7-eleven trips for two-liter bottles of diet coke
(they only sell diet pepsi through the fountain,
and i wanted to bring bottles up to the house.)

--------------------------

Boston is a small city for someone
who doesn't want to eat at chains,
you get to wonder if you can get
a decent bagel or a coffee that
doesn't taste burnt, and why does
Seattle have the reputation
of being a coffee city, it doesn't
take much to roast beans
and they can't even grow there.
Portland OR is known for great food
but the white supremacists take
the fun out of eating at the famous
donut place. There is always some
sucker who will eat a pepto bismol
donut. You know you've eaten great
food in San Francisco but years later
the only thing that stands out
are the used book stores, eating
crepes in the cafe next door,
caressing the spines of your new
acquisitions. The books end up stacked
on the floor bc you've run out of
bookcases. You get fish and chips
in an Irish pub in Chicago near
the train station. You think
NY pizza IS better than Chicago pizza.
You go see the Seurat at the Art
Institute, get as close as possible
to see the brush strokes. You don't
remember what you ate in Flagstaff
or Florida. You know crabs are
good in Baltimore but the bus driver
tells you not to venture too far
from the station. You spend the night
at the Phoenix airport eating
Cheezits and drinking soda from the vending
machine, the hours of limbo waiting
for the next flight out. Or Reno
Nevada, the all you can eat buffets
and the loud carpets. There are no
exit signs in the casino bc they
don't want you to leave
and you think: big fucking fire hazard
potential here. In Rhode Island
your grandfather catches fluke
and flounder and the adults cook
it right on the beach, with a little
bit of lemon, Gram's good but nondescript
potato salad, everyone with their
own version: celery, no celery, mustard
or no mustard. When you arrive in
Boston on Friday, the farmer's market
is going on in Copley Sq, you walk
around telling yourself: I want, I want, I want
something, I want these things, why
can't I have them.


August 18, 2019

up before sean and john,
i sit with rachel in the kitchen while she drinks coffee and preps breakfast,
while i fill myself with diet pepsi.
her and john's terrace is like a farmers' market,
growing tons of tomatoes and various herbs,
which she's preparing for this morning's breakfast,
a spinach omelette with tons of herbs,
tomatoes sliced for more of the bagels from brooklyn bagels that sean and i brought along with some lox spread and scallion cream cheese in thanks for the lodgings and the company,
and she sautees garlic and i don't know what else,
and well we talk and talk,
so easily as i pick at the sunday new york times and the boston sunday globe,
not the sunday boston globe mind you, but the boston sunday globe,
and she takes a cookie tray places the bagels she's cut for us this morning
and slides them into the oven for a massive toasting expedition,
as we listen to john's 10-million song  beyond eclectic ipod.
sean's still out on his five-mile run in training for his second half marathon,
so rachel covers his portion of the omelette with a bowl,
"it's a cute one, he'll like it."

------------------------

Day 3 of the BPM. I'm very tired,
very hung over and about to be drunk
again. The Cook family makes me cry
when they read their poetry
but they didn't make me do anything
other than wish I had better parents.
I remember the anti-war protests
and marches during the Bush years,
standing next to Noam Chomsky thinking:
he predicted this bullshit. Or the
night all the poets went bowling.
Or the copious amounts of alcohol
I drank until I could barely stand.
Years previous a friend and I
drove from Hartford to Boston at
2 am. The Combat zone is gone
and I wonder if that actually was
a good thing. All vice is now
being eradicated, the draq queens
and the night watchers, seeping
back to hundreds of years ago,
Brahmins and Puritains who never
smelled tobacco, set up camp
minus the laptops and the recharging
of cellphones. A city upon a hill
that can't quite accept its
bastard children. Some of my ancestors
arrived off a boat in 1632.
They wanted to serve god; I doubt
they asked themselves: just what
am I doing here? I'm here for
poetry. I'm here because I can't
decide whether nostalgia is fake
or real. I'm here because I've
loved and hated every place I've lived
and everything that falls in between
will end up in a poem, a poem about
a place that I tell myself: you could
have gone there, done that, but now
that venue is gone, and a high rise
or a Starbuck's has taken its place.


August 19, 2019

(sing to your own tune)

i get in this place,
just before it is tomorrow,
today's without my tv
time to end all the sorrow.

i get in this place,
grab some diet green turkey hill iced tea,
i'm more than half asleep,
but i really want to watch tv.

i get in this place,
start to watch until i fall asleep,
in a few hours i wake,
refreshed for a tv dive deep.

--------------------

Vermont the train rolls in on time

I listen to peaches lily allen jim carroll throwing muses morphine L7 talking heads

I start to wonder whether University is the Throwing Muses best album

Michael Jackson song Working Day and Night Off-the-Wall album let's discuss

I was thinking about what you can and cannot say about the dead

I have figured out the difference between vice and sleaze.

when we were smokers we used to know gossip


August 20, 2019

(poem within your lines)

I was thinking about what you can and cannot say about the dead

--by you you are speaking of others,
as i've never known you to hold back


when we were smokers we used to know gossip

--since you still smoke,
is it that you don't have enough fellow smokers to gossip with?

---------------------------

we used to write in notebooks, we used to fill
diaries, letters, letters from college,
postcards found when moving or packing,
we used to send our film to be printed
if we didn't know how to print it ourselves
we used to do so many things, laundry,
drill bit and screwdriver, play guitar,
clarinet, the constant psychosis
of a soundtrack playing in your head
now we call it a playlist, of you and me
and everyone we know, or not everyone,
not everyone can ride a bicycle or swim
and not knowing something should not
be a turn off for not knowing something
else, but if I could turn my pen into a weapon
to hurt you I would, but if you were
I would be hurt hurting you hurting someone
else I'd thrash them/you
with the bit ends of typewriter ribbons
I try and record everything, every hateful
thing said about me but it became too much...
when we were smokers we used to know gossip
we used to know what the deep end was…


August 21, 2019

in the kmart faux grocery store in penn station
before training to folks,
i have enough money for a bottle of orange powerade or whoppers,
i settle on the whoppers because i have a one-liter bottle of water in my bag,
and because in the bungalow colony in upstate new york,
where my family would summer when i was in single digits,
when we used to go to town
i'd ask for whoppers,
partially because i liked them,
partially because they came in a half-gallon cardboard milk container,
they continue to be another of the things that don't taste as good as i remember
but i continue to consume.

-------------------------

soda with a slice of pizza
is good once a year, I couldn't
get this in hawaii, soda yes
pizza no, but there was this
one place, in laupahoehoe maybe
or another town, where the pizza
was amazing, like you wouldn't
expect someone to do something
correct but did, it was a bit
of a rarity, cathy, dreama
and I scarfing down a pizza
while driving back to Hilo,
we tried to savor, but passing
the eucalyptus trees in that
one section of the highway,
the canopy overhead made us
hungry, it was dark or getting
dark, the sunset never fluctuating
too much from the dial, we had
no water and couldn't stop
because there was no store
for miles, except that one
gas station, with a sign that
said: scenic view. Of a cliff
drop. And the ocean. The thousands
of miles to anywhere else.


August 22, 2019

up early
i throw my first load of laundry into the wash at my folks' house,
screw around on my phone for half an hour or so,
then throw that load into the dryer and the next load into the washer,
set my alarm for 60 minutes in case i don't hear the the dryer alarm go off,
hear my phone alarm go off,
and a few minutes later the dryer alarm go off,
go to take the clothes out of the dryer and put the other clothes from the washer into the dryer,
and there's water everywhere,
the washer, which is supposed to fill up and then drain,
is full and still filling up,
and overflowing onto the floor,
i yell out to my dad that i can't shut it off what do i do,
unplug it from the wall, he yelled,
where i said,
by the slop sink,
and i don't know which is the washer and which is the dryer,
so i unplug them both.

-------------------------

while you had your ode to laundry
I looked into where what goddamn
streaming app had Andrei Rublev
I can rent it on the evil A platform
or the other evil A platform
and I thought of doing my laundry also
but I'm doing the "it's too nice out
to do laundry" so I sit on the porch
and read Stephen Jonas until I start
feeling decadent and unproductive
bc we must be producing producing
making product every day
and have someone else clean our shirts
because we are not retired, resting
on our so called laurels, free to do
the things we want to do, which is not
mundane tasks, we want to be thanked
for writing a poem instead of doing
laundry, almost thanked for sitting
through a four hour movie with no
popcorn and when someone asks what were
you doing in the 1990s you say:
watching arty films, I'm sure I must
have done laundry at some point:
I'm still here.


August 23, 2019

what was i doing in the 1990s?
starting a small press, boog,
and running it for its first nine years,
getting a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and quitting my ph.d program,
going back into publishing, well, newspapering,
having my first relationship end
and my last for now
(he says optimistically)
begin and end,
move out of new york state for the longest time I've ever spent out of new york state in my life,
45 days in san francisco,
studying poetry at naropa for parts of five summers,
driving 2,200 miles in six days with risa around colorado, utah, new mexico, and arizona,
finding a hotel an hour away from the grand canyon,
turning the tv on to find thelma and louise playing.

-------------------

the 90s, when you discovered
the Vaselines and saw Ministry
in Fitchburg MA, you wanted to
go into the mosh pit but you were
too sick and knew you'd get trampled,
you could feel the rumblings from
the bleachers. You went to hear
Ultra Vivid Scene and My Bloody Valentine
at some place in Boston, maybe the Ratt
or somewhere else, you stood
right against the speakers, felt
the reverberation of the feedback
at your feet, told yourself: I have
a reason to request you tell me
something twice, I have a good
twenty percent hearing loss,
I have been foolish in my youth
and some of me feels a bit of shame
and most of me wants to take
a machete to the shame, it's the
shame that kills people, the amount
of people who killed themselves
or overdosed or something,
Mia Zapata, beaten, raped and strangled
in Seattle, and we all know what
happened in Seattle, the "if it's such
a beautiful city why are so many
people dying" kind of place with
excellent coffee, the "so many
homeless people in downtown"
that people have given up on the problem,
they just perhaps look to Mt Rainier
and ask the god of the mountain:
who's going to fuck me over today,
Microsoft or Amazon? Or do I have
any other options?


August 24, 2019

my entire life my dad spoke of the mountain,
mount rainier,
waking up to it while he was stationed at fort lewis in 1948 and 1949,
its the main reason i went to seattle,
drawn out there by a patti smith-sleater-kinney double bill.

-----------------------

the salmon from Ireland
was wonderful, I told
my mother: we can't
afford to eat like this
every night. Later, we
all ate oysters and irish bread
with butter and a guinness
and I thought: yeah, is there
any way possible to eat
like this every day?
Aristocratic tastes
on a pauper's budget.
You'd never know there
was a famine, or people
intentionally starving themselves
on pilgrimages up to Croagh Patrick,
the so-called holy mountain,
but the only thing holy
is the view of water and islands


August 25, 2019

i celebrated graduating undergrad,
with one bottle of guinness,
the only guinness i've ever had

-------------------

even guiness got into the nitro beer
fame, I tried it, but it is not
the same thing as getting it from
a pub in Ireland. I like trad music
but I prever[prefer?] it in a pub, in Ireland.
Sometimes you have to go to the source.
I brought back some pricy duty free whisky
I could barely pronounce and I doubt
you could either, the hallmark of an
occasion to commemorate something,
a toast, after all, rural areas
Ireland, the land of stereotypes
the land of the drunks, the jobless,
or the hardy people who stick around
but hardly have a choice about history unfolding


August 26, 2019

we're about to watch another hallmark movie,
they always seem to make things better.

------------------------

Yeah, romantic endings like
thelma and louise, women
who kill themselves at the end
but hey, perpetuating the myth
of the perfect ending, where
nobody gets killed, no blood,
or knives or guns or twist
in plot bc that would be too
sophisticated, this is the basic
hallmark: there is somebody
for somebody, or something
with some calamity that people
can relate to, and we all
laugh at the end, similar to
a comedy show, cathartic,
but only up to a certain point


August 27, 2019

i'm still going to let you sleep over in a few weeks,
even though you disparaged my beloved hallmark movies,
because that's how big of a person i am,
harrumph.

----------------------

I went on the hallmark website.
All I saw was good or semi
good looking white men and women
in some ideal setting that
a fair amount of people we know
can't afford to visit
having some madcap adventure
that I would have thought
tame back in 1985. Back then you
or I or someone could have
gotten a job at hallmark,
writing greeting card wishes
or birthdays or I am so sorry
on the death of your
fill in the blank, and now
we have a card for every
love or sorrow, yet the movie
spin of the perfect one,
not the semi perfect, the
expectations are higher, someone
in the movie needs to know
how to ski, and doesn't,
and that then
is the joke


August 28, 2019

i am at the met game with my friend bill,
i've had two kosher hot dogs, half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a box of cracker jacks,
even though the mets are losing 10-6
it's a good night.

----------------------------

I got a speeding ticket in Shoreham VT
and I wanted to contest it
but I was in the wrong
but I was the only car
for miles around, no threat
to anyone but myself
and a bunch of corn


August 29, 2019

i  got the only speeding ticket of my life
may 8, 1985
on the meadowbrook parkway headed north to the nassau coliseum
to see hall & oates with 'til tuesday opening up,
the cop asked if i knew how fast i was going
"65," i said.
"they taught us in drivers ed that you can go 5 miles over the speed limit on local streets, and 10 miles over on parkways, and it's 55 here so i thought i would be okay."

-----------------------

driving to jones beach
to watch sinead oconnor
with a woman so beautiful
I asked where she was from
and she sd the bahamas
and I thought: yeah,
outa my league
but somehow managed to
take shortcuts to the venue
like a nyc taxi driver
concert probably post ripping up
a picture of the pope period
we had crap seats but we didn't care
we didn't carry our cameras
around with us, pre tracking devices
or apps I have no picture
of these things you have to
take my word for it


August 30, 2019

on st. patrick's day,
10 maybe 15 years ago,
at galapagos in williamsburg,
i had a bunch of people read irish poetry
before a live performance of sinead o'connor's i do not want what i haven't got,
(sharky doing nothing compares to you, damn)
the draw was minimal,
not enough to cover the high cost i was quoted for the recording of the show.

--------------------------

I have a picture of deer
cavorting around Coole Park
in Ireland, another picture
of poets, writers and artists
carving their names in a tree
on its way to dying, Maud Gonne
and the rest of spiritualists,
talking to the dead like they
knew something and could answer back
job in cambridge: asking people
for money, first they come for
vice, next for the poets
and the dancers, the lovers,
do the nationalists of each country
love... something... even
a picture of a picture
I have a hard time identifying
myself as anything other
than human these days
I go back to the early
green of the morning
the mist rising off the campus
of trinity college
in early april
a second where everything
is death or paradise


August 31, 2019

had a hard time motivating myself to ready for trip to my folks,
i thought i would skip my diabetes injectable,
then saw i did that yesterday so i inject away,
thought of maybe just a bagel for breakfast to make it easier than making oatmeal,
but i thought i had no bagels so i made oatmeal instead,
and then i closed up my computer,
and stripped my bed,
and packed my clean clothes,
and then my dirty ones,
and then the blueberries, strawberries, and bananas i bought from the fruit stand in my neighborhood for breakfast at my folks,
close roll-y bag,
then pro laundry bag my laundry was returned in once from the laundromat,
close my room off,
fill some water bottles and take a cold one for the trip,
though i'm hoping the kmart grocery is selling the half-gallon bottles of diet peach iced tea again.

-------------------------------

in hawaii I was living on food stamps
do you know how much you get
as a single person? $234 dollars
a month. Out of that money
you have to buy water with that
you then have less for food
I would go shopping with two bags
one for water, one for food
european shopping, in hawaii
in some farmers markets there were
papayas 7 for a dollar and why
were the mangos still expensive
and grew there, we would pick them up
when they fell on the side of
the road, the red road which is
no longer red, there are 50 kinds
of avocados, lady finger bananas,
orchids don't grow on trees
and pineapples grow in the ground
fact: blueberries are sparse
and imported, sometimes a stranger
or a man on a scam would ask me
to buy him food with my food stamps
and he would give me cash
this is what callous people say
or call it: "abusing the system"
so let's gut it. There are no
drug rehabs on the island
and the jail is in the middle
of the town next to the middle
again and high school. Very rich people
look like deadbeat hippies
until you see how much acreage
they own, how not to prejudge
but on the other hand, go beach
go beach, an end to an intellectual
discussion, you can't have
a conversation when at the beach
the beaches of hawaii, not like
the beaches of coney island
where vendors sell corona and water
alongside the sword swallowers
and fire eaters, us freaks,
the ultra amount of flowers, the hibiscus
juxtaposed to heroin addicts
in kona, the side the tourists don't see
tourists don't do laundry,
or are they like me, have endless
keys, keys, I find them in my purses
and bags, travel bags, bags, plastic
bags, south point particles of plastic
wind turbine half moving, a split
in the earth, geographical landscape
the first hawaiian word I learned
was keiki, meaning child. Could mean
human, could mean plant.
But meant larger. A part of a family.
Talking story meant much more than
which plane you took and how was the flight.
Did you know your family history.
Could you trace your ancestors back
to when, to when what, when?
And what are you going to do with
this information?