1. |
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you wake up and walk
three thousand days and sleeps
a thousand plays of Euripides,
Kresphontes and his mother
hand in hand a thousand times
till I wake up
and make up
coffee and a cigarette and
take a walk up Catherine to State
and over some, just like that.
I could fall back asleep
think Shakespeare, smell peonies or
Japanese maples, but still wake up and
walk up Catherine Street to State Street and over some.
Wake up and make up weaker coffee and
a stronger cigarette, make a few phone calls or write a
letter to Paris because that’s where
some people are.
Instead I walk over to a
plaza to sit:
the spinning cube
in the middle, black and almost abstract—
it’s five points are like fingers
one straight to the sky.
Someone with a good camera
is circumnavigating slowly and
smiling.
“We’re so juvenile” someone else yells.
It’s fun to turn that cube—
I’ve done it before
but not with someone pushing
me along yet faster—look at them go.
He’s hanging on and spinning as she pushes,
his legs swimming and he can hardly hold
on he’s laughing so hard. she’s
in heels, she wants to try, and
now she’s hanging on,
laughing.
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2. |
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Free Improv
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3. |
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"How to Get There" - Frank O'Hara, 1960, New York City
White the October air, no snow, easy to breathe
beneath the sky, lies, lies everywhere writhing and
gasping
clutching and tangling, it is not easy to breathe
lies building their tendrils into dim figures
who disappear down corridors in west-side apartments
into childhood’s proof of being wanted, not
abandoned, kidnapped
betrayal staving off loneliness, I see the fog lunge in
and hide it
where are you?
here I am on the sidewalk
under the moonlike lamplight thinking how
precious moss is
so unique and greenly crushable if you can find it
on the north side of the tree where the fog binds you
and then, tearing apart into soft white lies,
spreads its disease
through the primal night of an everlasting winter
which nevertheless has heat in tubes, west-side and
east-side
and its intricate individual pathways of white
accompanied
by the ringing of telephone bells beside which
someone sits in
silence denying their own number, never given out!
nameless
like the sound of troika bells rushing past suffering
in the first storm, it is snowing now,
it is already too late
the snow will go away, but nobody will be there
police cordons for lying political dignitaries ringing too
the world becomes a jangle
from the index finger
to the vast empty houses filled with people,
their echoes
of lies and the tendrils of fog trailing softly around
their throats
now the phone can be answered, nobody calling,
only an echo
all can confess to be home and waiting, all is the same
and we drift into the clear sky enthralled
by our disappointment
never to be alone again
never to be loved
sailing through space: didn’t I have you once for my
self?
West Side?
for a couple of hours, but I am not that person
[copyright Frank O’Hara, 1960]
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4. |
Related (March 17, 2012)
03:32
|
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related
I am awakened,
thusly
undone,
and the day
alit by all the words
written.
An orange
leather glove:
possibility
alights in my chest.
I am a naked tablecloth
or the unborn man in my head.
That guy is dreaming
choreography—
dreaming up
a dance troupe
in fine tweeds
no steps yet no
steps just fine tweeds
and all the undanced
steps.
A world cracked,
cracked
well above
beyond just in
this sky
today.
And out come
all possible
outcomes
converging
in that glimpse
of a glove
orange like
Buddhism or a
parking cone.
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5. |
||||
I don’t know why I’m doing this.
and poetry almost certainly won’t help or
some guy telling me his interpretation
of “write what you know” since
knowing is as easy as opening a book
realizing nothing is known it just
is—like a chest cavity is a vessel of
neuron byproduct, the scrapings of
fired thoughts that amount to the same
(unknown) thing every damn time
until one hour they don’t and I’ll
you’ll he’ll never know why and
caring about such things is distracting
vanity vanity until—look the
same old bones and maybe the marrow
is the soul or yoga is something important
that people do or they do something else
and write about it on the Internet like it’s
new like they can make it new because no
one alive is them and no one is as sad or
as anything as them since we can’t know
what we don’t know only guess at it, infer
via negation like antimatter—the
physicists have it right and maybe so do
the people who think the Large Hadron Collider
will never work because crack demolition teams
from the future are making sure we
don’t swallow ourselves whole with a glimpse a
real glimpse of the known unknowns
that keep us intact every day, within my
chest and the dusted heavens.
|
||||
6. |
||||
you wake up and walk
three thousand days and sleeps
a thousand plays of Euripides,
Kresphontes and his mother
hand in hand a thousand times
till I wake up
and make up
coffee and a cigarette and
take a walk up Catherine to State
and over some, just like that.
I could fall back asleep
think Shakespeare, smell peonies or
Japanese maples, but still wake up and
walk up Catherine Street to State Street and over some.
Wake up and make up weaker coffee and
a stronger cigarette, make a few phone calls or write a
letter to Paris because that’s where
some people are.
Instead I walk over to a
plaza to sit:
the spinning cube
in the middle, black and almost abstract—
it’s five points are like fingers
one straight to the sky.
Someone with a good camera
is circumnavigating slowly and
smiling.
“We’re so juvenile” someone else yells.
It’s fun to turn that cube—
I’ve done it before
but not with someone pushing
me along yet faster—look at them go.
He’s hanging on and spinning as she pushes,
his legs swimming and he can hardly hold
on he’s laughing so hard. she’s
in heels, she wants to try, and
now she’s hanging on,
laughing.
|
Gary Prince Andrew Klein Baltimore, Maryland
Andrew Klein is a poet, writer and editor based in Baltimore. Gary Prince is a guitar teacher and performer located in Washington, DC. They first met in 2004 as students at the University of Michigan. Gary and Andrew started this poetry-music collaborative project in the Spring of 2012, these recordings are its first fruit, and we hope you enjoy them, warts and all. ... more
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