Tuesday, Nov 19th at the TARATAN

...be there or be a listless euclidean square with no dimension....

Beer in Autumn

 

There's just something about drinking beer in autumn,

Intermittent swigs tailgating

Chrome stalks blaring light

 Friday nights in the country

Lumbering rustle of a Combine

In an aching field as the

World welds shut in a crisp lid of darkness

pilsner moon dangling overhead,

splotches of frost gnawing into the earth

There’s just something about drinking

Beer in autumn

Beer that erupts in an applause of minty hops

the moment it hits your palate.

Beer that leaves sudsy latitudinal residue

on the interior of the chalice after each swig

 demarcating its territory in hyphenated rips of foam.

 

BEER

Cornerstone pinwheel keg,

The gushing tap of a draught

Shot gunned, chugged, case-raced

Flip cupped, t-wolfed,

Siphoned in circuitous plastic funnel

Receptacle of ponged orbs

Faceless lotto, power hour

SOLO cupped, or quaffed

 In one lugubrious slurp

from a Translucent boot

There’s just something about drinking beer in autumn

 

 

Feint crackle of sulphuric embers

Echoes olfactory mantras

Mixed with Keatsian odes

Hawthorne vowels, Nautical swill

amber suds, leafy foliage of the earth

running naked with deer and Walt Whitman

yeasty beer belly a cummerbund of flesh

silver drizzle of harvest stars

 

There’s just something about drinking beer in autumn

Orange flavor six-pack in a tree stand

Rifle claps, sentences attired in bulbs of breath

 clods of ice in a bucket

Shuffling fantasy football stats, pumpkin

sky drifts off into a lucid umbrella of darkness

 

How I’ll continue to drink Beer in autumn

Brachiating from barstool skeletal

Boughs of trees  continue to drink (beer)

 Until Prometheus peels my liver

 from the strip of flesh

Flattened it like a leaf

I wedged in a notebook

For a high school biology class

Not realizing that this vascular organ

 Thanksgiving dinner table colors

Was somehow once able to breathe.

 

 

 

 

Thanks to everyone who came out and read at our last autumnal open mic at the TARTAN INN!!!

...17 readers'!!!! It felt like I was choreographing the oscars!!!  Thanx for showing up and evincing your heart via alphabetical emblems of light!!!!

 

... eternal devotional gratatitude towards Charlie Bennett & Freudian Press...

Remember a time, remember it well, when the neon-street nesty autumnal bluffs of this orphaned rivertown was a bookmark to a fairytale, a time when one could traipse into the cargo fraught chestnut coffee shop and wade into an aerie carousel plume of smoke as if doing chin-ups above a cloud, a time where there was flannel and there was an (excess of hemp and patchouli) and there was local poetry readings downtown and there was art . A time when our tresses scaled back from the cognizant attics of our respective scalps like Rapunzel patiently awaiting the tug of a wished-for suitor. A minstrel. A wizened gen-x troubadour who wields his guitar upsidedown pelting out acoustic locomotive frets of loneliness, whispered epistles of eternity, symphonic folk anthems culled from the leftover childhood magic in the air of a cradled lullaby-- the compass of a dream.

The music of Charlie Bennett a la Freudian Press encapsulated the transient echo of this time that still somehow reverberates in the interior artistic kiln of outsider artists everywhere who just don’t give a Freudian phuck knowing that, while ambling down the lonely arteries of that gypsy road clad only in the Mr. lazy bones of his flesh, with nothing in his pockets save for a Tommy Jones mortgage of ambition and change, the music of Freudian Press will be there, the solitary sound the last copper-colored leaf of autumn makes as it sheds the wick of the birch tree branch and hushes to the ground exploding into the sun of all mankind. Experience the music of Freudian Press Thanxgiving eve at the whammy bar.Welcome home Charlie. Timeless as it may seem, a delightful indulgence of a dared afternoon daydream.

...to experience bliss, click....

October 13th, 1988

 

The girl with the curly blonde hair The girl who I think about late at night wearing her leotard and her Take Five dance studio costume. The girl who can do the no-handed aerial-cartwheel where she tucks her arms in to her shoulders like dual pyramids as she becomes suspended in the pond of the atmosphere above before landing perfectly. The girl I grew up with who my mom used to babysit who walked barefoot in my back yard capturing fireflies in transparent mason jars. The girl who is the cheerleading captain. The girl who, a filched decade later in my life, will serve as the inspiration for the daffy female protagonist of my thousand page tome of postmodernism. The girl who sat next to me on the Bleachers when she giggled and asked if she could call my house during her sleepover. The first girl I ever gave the digits of my phone number to when she asked if she could call my house during her fifth grade birthday sleepover and play an innocuous game called, “call a boy up and tell him a joke.”

 The girl who wears her cheerleading uniform to school on game days and does a series of backflips across the freshly linoleum mint of the gymnasium floor.

 The girl who tells you before Misses Reinhardt’s fifth grade year that she loves this song. That she goes home and dances to this song. That she just can’t get enough of this song. That at night, when she is all alone in her room, she gets up and turns on this song and jounces on her mattress thinking of the boy who sits next to her in class  

The girl who went to the purported rival high school in town where she was the cheerleading captain. The girl whose brother is your age and who was diagnosed with the same vile disease that stripped the breath of your father from his body only he was able somehow to beat it.

The girl whose kiss I tried to kiss by the deep sea blue of the stage curtain separating the gulping lip of stage from the remainder of the audience in spring only to find her somehow, looking back at me, her face the color of cheap wine cooler, hitting the ashen dome of her cheek bone, smiling...

If it isn't autumn and you are in fifth grade.

If It isn't... 

 

FUEL

 

 

Is the first bar on Main Street to herald a rainbow flag

Hoisting a shadow of flagellating pride

over the dead-tooth neon sidewalks

Overturned chandelier caricatured fingers

Reverberating subwoofers, lolling baritone

Dirge, Hopscotch of variegated strobe casting

Keyhole silhouettes

Genderless splotch

 Human beings gyrating

Cogs and pistons in a Caterpillar tractor

Dancing into the peach of dawn.

 

Fuel is the boys with short hair, tucked in white shirts

Sometimes wearing dresses and heels  and glitter

Salt and pepper shaker

Chafed genitals, vowels of the night

Finding yourself in every shot you slam at the bar

Angel on your tongue

Feather of your name.

 

Fuel is

The chromosome furl of an awareness ribbon

Limbs marching in stonewell stalks of denim,

 Knowing when to DV8

Into the side alley Underground  popping

Pomegranate seeds with Persephone like ecstasy

 

Fuel is the drip your smile creates

Every time it exhales

Dalliance of chemicals kissing diesel

Life breath with spring air.

 

Fuel is kindness of a proprietor

who buys drinks for patrons,

Another round for everyone

Courage to disintegrate the

flippancy of social barriers

last brick culled from the blockade in Berlin

 

and Fuel is the heat your body gives off

crackling in an incendiary nest

welts and flames,

swilled cognizance

 errant blink

diva’s bow, flicker applause

 punctuating heave

last breath knowing

that you gave

every sip of bottled

 oxygen for strangers

to stay warm.

 

 

--Todd Scholl

 

1966-2013

Anticipating rockin' out the stage at OPEN MIC POETRY READING at the Tartan Inn t'morrow showcasing the finest in contemporary verse including the ravishing rants of Hollye Green (who just published a new book of FIRES IN EDEN), the blistering beat sonatas of Kyle de Valk, the philosophical pandering's of Joshua Franz Stucko and Krista Buchanan, whose voice sounds like an angel trapped in an upside down shot glass....the event is free and all are welcome to come and perform, imbibe a quality craft beer, and wade in the narrative sea of voices caroling the stories we tell to somehow find ourselves....the event starts at 8pm...please come!!! (and Valena Jackson..thanks for the picture!!!)

Tuesday Oct 8th at the Tartan Inn...

Emily Dickinson Sanitary Napkin

...is a fan (for all you female poets out there) of the Emily Dickinson sanitary napkin...they are slender and pale with an autumnal scent of Amherst coating the interior lush of your loins and you will never need to leave the contours of your writing desk (or yer home) ever again...hell, people won't even discern you are wearing one until YEARS after yer unsuspecting and romantically reclusive de...mise....so for the modern feminine poet who cannot possibly stop for the excessive grammatical dash of death and whose heart is already bleeding over some priest's cavalier civility, manacle a box supply of Emily Dickinson sanitary napkins to your writing desk for the next 30-40 years because, (after all, ahem) "After a great pain, a formal feeling comes...."

peace

       

 

 

PEACE

 

It was the payphone at the

Abandoned gas station;

The payphone stationed

In a vertical blue manger,

The crooked payphone

Whose chrome slit

 only accepted

Quarters, the same phone where

A week earlier, hung over from my

Late night labor day fete,

the prostitute

With thick stropped boots

Whose angular chin and sloping gait

Reminded me somehow of

 Hester Prynn stomped up

And solicited told me that if I’d give her a

Twenty dollar bill she’d give me a

Blowjob and thinking, in that moment

That perhaps I could somehow save her

I emptied my wallet and asked only

That she give me a hug

Rushing back later that day, my

Pantry emptied in a cardboard box

My confirmation bible

Saluted beneath the pit of my arm

I found only the slender

slope of the payphone

coiling from it’s

Receiver, the tail a fresh suicide

Casting a downtrodden

Shadow in the opposite

Direction of the saffron-raked

sun.

The dial-tone, still

Emitting a warbled devotion

Informing me that I was somehow

too late.

 

 

It was the same payphone a week

Later

The day when the sleek coated

Macadam plummeted

From the hard nickel of heaven

Stitching a metallic nest

parched rubble cratered protein

I held the cyperoptic conch

In my hand like the fetus we lost

Gouged out the numerical bleeps

Knowing that your husband

Would probably answer that phone

Which, of course he did

And I asked for you

 

That moment I cupped

The dove swoop of your tongue

In my ear

Tilted into my shoulder.

I didn’t have to identify myself.

I told you what I should have told you long ago

Then I asked for forgiveness

 

In that moment

My baby, my darling girl

I swear,

You were cradled in the girth avenues

of your own husbands arms

Accompanied by the Dim lit aquatic

glower of the television

Closeups of befuddled

newscasters in loose ties

In that momentary shuffle

In that atomic hush

When you didn’t know what to say

So you said nothing

Some how then

We found peace           

We found it

Alone

After all this time

There was somehow peace         

Somehow we found it,

 

still.

 

--for Megan Kristin

M'leece angel....

Dear readers:

This is my artistic soulful snow-angel and botanical lyricist Mileece I'Anson...she channels the sound of the earth via all things organic and vernal..I've had the privilege of knowing this creature for the last five years (a la David Sereda's the Voice) and was honored to crash at her pad last autumn when I performed my poems at Dirty Laundry LIT...Today she is featured in (my favorite) publication the New York times....Mileece, I am so proud of you..here is me giving you a hug!!!! 

Once again, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga showed up to one of my poetry readings and started taking their clothes off every time I read (Lady Gaga came dressed in an outfit made from an old TROLL book order form and Miley just pretty much got naked right away even though everyone thought she looked like Annie Lennox with that Robocop-tampon haircut) and once again, I ended the night reading excerpted hi-lighted junior high stanza's from THE BABYSITTERS CLUB and Miley and Gaga mistook it for Emily Dickinson and swore it was the most profound thing they simply had ever heard... after a great pain a formal feeling comes...sigh....

Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly and beyond....

...the writer en route to his sylvan writing desk....photo by Valena Jackson...

...sounds ike something my dear high school english teacher Larry Reents woud say....

..was cruising down past the seven figure mansions of antiquity dotting the cusp of Grandview drive last night with my dear high school English teacher when he turned to me and oh-so poetically posited, "Look David, Those are the houses where all the writers' who don't use run-on sentences live."

WHAT HE WANTS

WHAT HE WANTS

He wants not to be so bitter at the world all the time

He wants to know that he is clean

He wants to stop working such exorbitant hours every semester

Wants to read a book a week

He wants to get his shit together

He wants a pair of shoes that doesn’t have holes in them

Until he remembers the famed photograph of

Jonathan Larson holding up his pair of sodden

Converse sneakers limp by the top heel

As if the holy spirit

In ornithological dove form

Had just been shot dead with a pellet gun

 

He wants not to drink so much on the weekend

 

He wants to fuck her brains out

He wants the canvas of the screen to be the

Sunrise he looks into first thing in the afternoon

When he rises (because he works third shift

And sleeps on a futon he found near the dumpster)

He wants security

He wants to finish the book he started eight years ago

He wants to be able to pay off his debts

He wants to go down to his father’s grave

And tuck his chin into his neck

As his face falls into a

Triangle of wet prisms

 

He wants to really be there for his mother

 

 

But more than anything else

he wants to wake up one morning

In the hard frost of early February

And find her body asleep

Next to his body

Her chin and lips

Exhaling invisible ripples

Paddling across the dashboard of his chest

 

He wants to take a moment

And just look at the way

Her forehead and her cheekbones

Form a gentle meadow of peace

 

The warmth of her body

 The serene pasture of her eyelids

  

The amen of the prayer that is to come.

 

Thinks that the only apt punishment for Riley Cooper is that he should be coerced into playing the role of Jim in the Philadelphia community theatre's musical adaption of Samuel Clemens Huck Finn. Then should give a lecture on racism for inner city youth. The should give away his untoward million dollar a year salary to public schools. Then should be publically lynched, brain dead inane-inbred hick. Where is Chuck D when you need him...


                                      

Watergate Waterbeds

 

 

 

In the wake of the Zimmermann debacle I’ve decided to quit my ongoing pursuit of pending literary greatness, cash in my flaccid 401K and open a chain of civic-soporific oriented furniture stores called WATERGATE WATERBEDS, not only because I had sex on a waterbed last week for the first time and it felt like my entire anatomy was sloshing around like cosmic mitochondria sifting through the subtle... surf that is time, but because, here at WATERGATE WATERBEDS we avail the patriotic patron with the opportunity to fall asleep on the truth. Recent WATERGATE WATERBED owner Rebecca Hinder from Onan Prairie, Nebraska notes in a hand-written letter that ever since she invested in a WATERGATE WATERBED she doesn’t mind lying to her husband Herb Hinder about how bad the sex really is. “Our WATERGATE WATERBED really saved our marriage. Herb thinks he’s Casanova, and I don’t feel guilty thinking eensie-weensie thoughts about that store clerk from HOME DEPOT who handed me the caulk after it accidentally fell out of the shopping cart that one time.”

Public school teacher Imogene Wilcox of Koinonos Falls, Michigan notes that she just used to “stay up freckled-tooth and frazzled all hours of the night,” worrying about her students’ who were roughly the same age of Trayvon Martin, but ever since she purchased her WATERGATE WATERBED. “It’s like I’m numb to everything. I know if any of my students do find themselves in a sort of pickle, I have faith in the legal system to do the right thing.”

And so the good book won’t slip out of the sheets in the middle of the night, if you order now, your WATERGATE WATERBED will come replete with a bible belt.

So make the political choice and choose WATERGATE WATERBEDS. After all, if you were born in the late-seventies you were probably conceived on one and, like your current mattress, the truth can sometimes be hard to sleep on.

After all, it’s the American Dream.

Went for a long tortuous drive through the vernal exclamatory-shaped corn husks dotting the dun haze country side that is Fulton county. Stopped at a Casey's gas station somewhere near Banner marsh and picked up two six packs, a cup of grainy coffee and some cheap cigars. Found a desolate dirt road and followed it for about 45-minutes into the cricket-oratorio oblivion that is rural Illinois at winking dusk in mid July, sweat aligning my brow like beads on an abacus. The moon was an ivory enhanced magnified toe-nail clipping boomeranging overhead and the West was an incendiary sip of left over birthday party Tang. In the middle of nowhere I stopped the car, got out, took off my shirt and just started screaming, howling, cursing, Sylvia Plathing-out-of-control, casting imprecations of eternal impotency on the people I love who have really hurt me, the lovers who have abandon me, the friends' who have fucked me over, the makeshift nest of mistakes I have made. I screamed for five minutes as loud as I could, a koan of sorrow and loss. I then had a beer and forgave those I had damned, those that I love. Forgave myself. Driving away, severing the rearview mirror above the dashboard because now, after all this time, after all this hurt, I don't want to look back.

Phuck yeah, that felt good. That felt really good.

..poem to commemorate the closing of CHAMPS WEST....

ENRAPTURED

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surely it would be like this:

 

The brazen herald from some celestial bugle

trumpeting punctuating decay

shrill of a junior high tardy bell

 

The dated Christmas tree bulb, the planet tilting

its cosmic neck as if to work out enervated kinks,

saddle of jigsaw cardboard  continents dripping sideways

 tectonic funeral tears

  cataclysmic zippers crackling

dotting the floorboard of the earth

in a fissure of fear

 

Oceans thrashing gargling  up

coastlines in bristled sweeps

volcano blowing their subterranean wad

mother earth menstruating fire and ash

Tornados skidding, Tsunami's roaring

 

Skyscrapers toppling like a game of drunken jenga

patches of the sky falling in heavy geometrical trapezoids

splattering thuds  anvils in cartoons

 

And this is how it would be

as reality unbuttons itself

 

A quadrant gospel of  devious

horsemen hackling in  neighing canters

across the Golgotha-gray horizon

 

graves rising like steeples caricatures in a children’s pop-up book

 

Overweight middle-aged naked Christians

elbowing each other to be first in line

making little “told-you-so” gestures with their fingers

at those who are left

 

ST. Peter holding an Ostrich quill

checking hotel room reservations

 

While below puppet sized incubuses

Prod pitch forks into the

Shoulders of  porn shop patrons

Marshalling them into a fire-laced

Subway staircase to suffer and to burn beneath

 

Cylinder Mayan Disc calendars

 Ricocheting satellite’s, asteroids plummeting

 failed comets hammering

like court-sentencing gavels as

albino buffalo stampede across great plains

 

cherubim and seraphim

playing soccer at Stonehenge

with black and tan Tao emblems

lotus plants plopping

crop circles rising like yeast as

 

marooned-coated Buddhists monks levitate 

towards enlightenment in pyramidic posture 

 Israel being removed  with a scalpel

boomeranging into outer space

concealed in a snow globe bubble

Mecca rising on all fours following

a MT. Arafat-sized silhouette of Muhammad, pointing

 

The entire continent of South America herds llamas into Alien spaceships headed for Andromeda

 

Thunder searing,  cities drowning, the mantle of the earth being riped from its skull

 

planets clanging together like abacus beads

 

the sunflower sun achingly

exhaling one final exclamatory wink

before giving birth to  nuclear miscarriage

blossoming into a butterfly supernova

 

yet still seven minutes away

 

 and how

 

in that moment

 

as this pocket of reality gradually snaps out of being

 

I want to find myself

seated on an overturned

cathedral doorway

hovering life raft

through the grainy dregs of

galactic nothingness

burrowed

in the earth of you arms

 

kiss the In the beginning  of your forehead

lose myself in the fleeting

cosmic eternity of your eyes

 

enraptured all this time.

 

 

 

                               

(performed C. West/ Bloomsday 2011/BLACKSTARSEA RADIO/ART SHOW/ Dirty Laundry LIT Hollywood)