Roots travel
Madrid to Galicia
Paris to bougainvillea
Field guide to love and civilization
Water the garden
War blossoms
Beauty and perpetual anxiety
Soul fire, sulfur, sullen harmonies
Solitaire
Out of the center
*
Drunk at 2am
I knocked on Lennie’s window
Woke him up
After an hour rambling on & on
He threw me out
The police picked me up on the street
Booked me for public drunkenness
and disturbing the peace
*
Fan turns
105 degrees Fahrenheit outside
The dog licks his balls
I chew gum
Bees swarm
the baklava
*
Peaches, plums, nectarines
Apricots and melons
Barbecue
three times this week
Food is the
only thing that interests me
Stiff ass and a bum gut
This might be a good time to get a real job
*
Some beautiful puzzles broken and unfixable
It takes forever to hear back from the manufacturer
The dog poops on the end of a leash
Then pulls me down the road
The reference remains obscure
50 years towing the hoe, whoring the woe
And a handful of maple leaves shudder
Shift. Switch
Drop back or step in
I compose by contrast and condition
*
Slumber party in Orense
Raccoon knocks over birdbath
and crushes abutilon
Looking for lots of places
Lizards chase each other
across the crunchy madrone leaves
On the death of Billy Graham’s wife Ruth,
“a spiritual stalwart and modest mentor
who provided a solid foundation –
both biblically and geographically –
for her globe-trotting husband.”
Billy tells the reporter,
“"I wish you could look in that casket
because she's so beautiful,"
I think I’ll pass
*
Corrosive
devotion sweeps the theater
Leaky hot tub too hot to handle
Robert Johnson morning glory hat trick blues
33 pounds
of noir travel wear
Angel food cake itinerary
Everything
is depressed
and
second-rate
*
A boy is lost in the redwoods
We look for him
*
Invisible repair
*
Alone in the house
The hot tub too hot
I take a shower
*
Right here beside the rug is a house
What do I think of when I grind my teeth?
Everything!
Last night I read a poem by Miguel de Unamuno
Poet and philosopher born in Bilbao
Poet and philosopher born in Bilbao
who worked to dissolve the boundaries
between genres
Beauty resists resistance
*
Methhead whore
tricking truckers
on River Road
The World’s Ugliest Politician
announced in New Jersey
*
Sleep without remorse
*
Sudden oak death threatens the neighborhood
Spiders, mosquitoes, hip-hop, jazz
Anti-social dissociation and assemblage
*
Yesterday's leaky toilet turned jackhammer
(some kind of air pocket in the pipes)...
How much will that cost?
Hernia surgery gone awry
Dog needs his teeth cleaned
Trunk release won’t release
The surgeon says give it another 3 months
Meanwhile the blue jay tears up the garden
*
“The door’s wide open!” Terri says
“I did it
on purpose” I say
“I know but you’re letting in all the bugs”
*
“Rich fucks”
*
Too full to shower
Too dirty to get into bed
Remember what the Buddha says:
“Stay Spunky!”
*
A man left a million dollar violin on a train
Another man got temporal mandibular joint malfunction
After shooting a man in the head while hunting grouse
*
You try, you try, you win, you fail
*
Drive across Pyrenees in an amphitheater
What is going on? I said to myself
*
EXTENDED METAPHOR
STRETCH THAT!
*
Mutual aid survives mutual funds
Utilities are over utilized
Craft kisses Art goodbye
*
6 squirrels lounge around the birdbath
Grooming, dozing, chirping
Rodents armed with knives
Try to kill me in my sleep
I make plans for revenge
They’ll never catch me now!
*
I learn how to raise bees
Plant lemons in a wine barrel
Journalize delusion
*
Swarm of black bugs eat the house
Then attack the dog
I beat them off with a broom
A peacock comes to live on the deck
Beware of this feathered woman
she will possess you
Ruddy ferns on Goat Rock
*
My problem is that I want attention
But when I get it, it makes me nervous
. . .continuing
Spider silk stretches
from Morning-Glory
to glowing redwood
*
Arabs in Spain
Gypsies in Paris
Jews in America
Diaspora clothesline
“We are in
a global state of emergency and must stabilize
our
existence?” George Bush says
My son sits up until 3am watching movies about Spain
thinking about where he can buy a beer and a joint
with fake ID manufactured in Mexico
There would be no peace
even if we closed the borders.
We don’t believe in peace
We believe in Original Sin.
*
Shredded clouds
hover over the anxious house
*
Reserve a room in Figueres
“A foot that is injured has no eyes,”
a West Indian saying
*
Castles, cider, Spain
Another fascist cemetery
Medieval romance
Next week Gaudi, octopus, tapas in general
Then to Paris
*
Bladder report
Short and urgent
Death over semantics
*
I don’t need traveler’s checks
I need a piggy bank for loose change
and a brain for loose screws
I’m not going into town today
Intervals
I found them in a file cabinet
A century ago
Yesterday, this morning, a minute ago
I am embraced by a shadow
*
Empty out hot tub
Move plants off the deck
Closer to departure
*
BUD POWELL IN BARCELONA
Rain all day & Joan Miró sleeps late
How many discos?
Bowls of fried minnows and olives
On the Ramblas
Go on some side street
Suddenly, Christ
There’s a huge church that drips tears
and a mission of bells clang
Rome in ecstasy
Catalonia is not Spain
Marilyn Monroe in the “Metropolis”
You can see Paris Hilton everywhere
I remember The Surrealists
Nostalgic groves
A thousand cars bumper to bumper
Eager to visit that quaint little village, Cadaqués
Animal crackers in my paella
Take a picture
Ride back over the mountain
Cafe Americano
The singer is a fraud
VISPO is a village in Spain
“M” is for Maria Madrid
Aquarius, the world is your oyster
The earth is your old mother
Your sunglasses at home
Visions of langostinos
on the promenade
The crooked line
The escalator
Gondola, Taxi con gas
Hernia on tranquilizer
Ascent of Miró
I had a print of one of his paintings
On my wall for 40
years
Tapestry!
Assassination of umbrellas
*
GUADI BARCELONA
25 Euro- Sagrada Família
16 Euro- Casa Batlló
16 Euro- La Pedrera
*
The Imagination of Space
*
We are so proud it kills us
*
Simplicity of paying bills
Complexity of dreaming
Terror of invention
Fear of insomnia
Donuts and boobs on the Costa Brava
Cured ham and clams
Outside Teatro Museo Salvador Dalí
Vertigo and a drunk art student from Denver
*
Salmonella
I can see the Eiffel Tower
from the toilet in my Paris hospital room
Deck builder’s hammers echo in redwood valley 8am
Art and prophecy a parlor trick
Chunks of sunburned Styrofoam become stelae
Illuminate a personal mythology
*
Déjà vu Doodles: Or, things I already drew
*
One rainy day I was stopped for running a red light
I told the cop I didn’t see the light because
my windshield wiper was broken
He gave me two tickets
*
Crazy Americans
*
We wake to rustling in the leaves
A flock of human babies forage
among new shoots
The shepherd, a wizened mutant, guards the perimeters
from ravaging crocodiles
Life is easy in the redwoods
*
The velvet night
The orange rose
*
Chiqui the dog likes Cheerios
with his morning coffee
September fog crisis
I miss
those voices
I used to
write everything until Joanne said,
“You don’t have to write everything”
NOW
I can’t write anything. . .
Terri takes Chiqui for a walk
He likes to go for a walk after his morning coffee
Three
deer in an oak leaf crush
“The Earth's shadow will creep across
the moon's surface early Tuesday, slowly eclipsing it
and turning it shades of orange and red.”
“Don LaFontaine has the rare distinction of being
influential yet invisible.”
I look for some sloppy personality footprint,
Something stinky in the verse like greasy bacon
or muenster cheese.
Familiar bad logic, stigma obsession, redundancy. . .
Velvet
stars, cherry blossoms & peanuts,
proles,
deer, bears and Buddha
*
WHEEL
Steal apples from neighbor’s tree
“The
Gleaners”
rotavirus
Mea culpa
hummingbird feeder
pig
mask
Terri
takes the trash out
September 17 at 3:15
BERLIN - Skippi, a
wily kangaroo on the run since early August was returned to his home at a
petting zoo Monday in southern Germany, after a chase through the German Alps
that left the animal with a strained leg.
*
I’m allergic to milk but I’m okay looking at it
*
There’s a massive spider web in Lake Tawakoni State Park,
Texas
You can hear the mosquitoes screaming
I’m violently attached to my ego
WYOMING, Mich. - A car
wash employee got tangled in the giant, automatic brushes and died, authorities
said.
“Be careful of the scaffolding,” PW
*
A journal (with no dates)
Horrors, terrors and rainbows
A lock of Che Guevara’s hair
goes up for auction
goes up for auction
*
Luciano Pavarotti goes missing in a song
Antonio Machado stuck in my head
*
The ficus tree
that grew in my backyard
when I was kid
The one I used to climb all the time
One day I came home and it was gone
*
I don’t like change
*
LIFE OF A HARBOR SEAL
“A shark knocks you stupid and you wake up dead”
*
Dogs offer a “semblance” of love
*
A thousand dollars later the hot tub still leaks
The middle class feels guilty
The rich are still shameless
The occupation continues
*
Jim says I have an impressive package
*
I'm OCD and don't know
whether to cut my hair or slit my wrists!
"Don't worry,” Jim says, “You don't have to choose, you
can do them both"
Terri says, "Cut your hair first"
A friend who has OCD writes:
“I'm having trouble piecing together the juxtapositions.
The 1st & 3rd section could fit if I knew more about the
‘package.’
Am I missing something? The other thing is that when you say OCD
Am I missing something? The other thing is that when you say OCD
to me it has a very different weight & meaning
than it does to the average reader. I have OCD up the wazoo.
You're offering humorous OCD that sounds more like
indecisiveness than real OCD. So I find it funny, tongue in
cheek,
but so far the strongest relation I see between 1 & 3 is
‘throwing the baby out with the bath water,’
which is the whole hog way some OCD folks would
operate.
*
Reflex tics. . . borderline personality. . .slow gray
morning
*
Hysterical propaganda
Apples and honey with Bambi and company
Fall here
Crow, sorrel, pink rose
Civil war, moon walk
Neo-Nazis in Israel
Neo-Nazis in Israel
Tantra, farmer, anarchist
*
Gray-haired hippies in Monte Rio airplane hangar movie house
watch Sicko and
weep
*
Sunday
Paint window frame green
Kathy has a surplus of eggplants
But only gives us one
A man and woman jog through the redwoods
With a large Golden Retriever
Organic chicken and apple sausage
Watching Washington “die-in” protest on TV
Some dead and undead
*
September 17, 2007
9am, Hall of Justice
Jury Summons
Case:
Decide whether repeat sex offender,
convicted twice of rape and having served his time
should go into a mental hospital or be released
Fill out hardship form:
Insomnia, under treatment for a year, difficult to
concentrate
Weak bladder, under treatment for about a year,
need to get up 2 or 3 times an hour to pee
Have travel plans to read poetry in Tucson & New Mexico
in two weeks therefore unable to sit in on a long trial
Excused!
Rush out of the room with copy of Democracy in America
and The Journal of
Albion Moonlight
*
Dear K___ ,
Don't mind David. He always has this anxious crankiness and it doesn't mean anything at all. Sometimes it makes me tired but I never take it personally. Maybe it's general anxiety disorder. That's what I have. My counselor says he doesn't believe in all that stuff because people are so different. But if I have to have something that's what he thinks I have. So onward,
Love, Michael
*
STILL BEAUTIFUL for TC
Dizzie Gillespie and Joan of Arc wing
through invisible curtains
Squirrel taps the fence
Demands more bird seed
Wake up, Goddammit!
The congregation kneels
at the edge of the great chasm
I dive into the aquarium
Read poetry to the sharks
How did transparency get so complicated?
Foxglove
Glowworms
Scorpion on the
sink
I discover something permanent
But don’t know what to do with it
Various petunias hatch from my skull
What do you believe in?
*
In Chiricahua Park outside of Bisbee he says, “Enough! Enough! Too much beauty. I can't take it. All the clouds and cacti!” So we go to a rundown, kinda rundown desert town, Douglas, on the border, check how our American money is being spent on fences to keep us in and them out and so forth. Big billboards with methheads dissolving against the desert sky. Drove up to Coronado national monument, gravel road mountain overlook. I got vertigo but kept it quiet mostly. Awesome views of Mexico, road runners, sparrow hawks, agave, desert spoons, ocotillo, black caterpillar, deer, and a black and white lady bug David snatched from my sleeve to make a wish. The poetry reading went well last night. A very sweet crowd of friends, locals. Hospitable and receptive. Today Tucson. Stop in another desert park I can't pronounce.
*
The nurse says, “Look, I have too much to do to worry about
germs.”
Is all irony poetry?
*
Solomon Excavation Company: “The King Digs”
“I’m a stranger in paradigm”
Porcupine Wash
Ocotillo
250 miles an hour, dollars a minute
Nothing’s been the same since the Beatles broke up
Punk rock desert
Saguaro crucifix
Crazy, craggy, jagged mountains
Tap dancing across the wild and wooly west
Where have all the postcards gone?
“Doing Pilates on the banks of the Ganges”
The pose and poems of yesteryear?
“Postcards meet & merge & mutate,
become one great wall size poster
that you can’t mail.”
The improvisation takes over
“Cicada Sonata”
*
David sleeps in, overdosed on Saguaro and cholla forests
*
Road to Moab
Cryptobiotic crust
Snow flurries
Sandstone arches and the sky beyond
The Beauty becomes painful and The Void
takes the breath out of us all.
—Michael
Rothenberg
