1. Sometimes they are just words, those little pieces of poetry that so many poets write. (Words found on bathroom walls, words found in garden fountains, words outside of books scribbled down on tissue paper...).

2. What are poems? “The Raven” from Edgar Allan Poe spoken in the voice of Christopher Walken: “Once upon a midnight dreary...”, calm and collected? Iggy Pop punk rock coffee stains on his “Blah Blah Blah” record covers? Words gathered and spread like so many unwashed diseases underground, along railway tracks where the junkies allergic to junk sleep, like William Burroughs eating “Naked Lunch” for breakfast in Budapest while shooting junk into his veins... Dante’s “Inferno”?

3. Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Poemsarefire! Poem(sin)lust!

4. (Obvious observation): Poetry can lead to “suicide”: the occasional concept of writing poems: Sylvia Plath, 1963. “Ariel or Winter Trees”. The English poet Laureate Ted Hughes divorced her like a well used poem left in a laundry mat (So many bells fall like rotting leaves). Shit!, that makes Ted sound terrible (and he wrote Snowdrop from “Lupercal!”: “Her pale head heavy as metal.”). So, like a poem poor Sylvia killed herself. Then she became famous! And Ted even dedicated a book for her (a collection of her own poetry,
even).

5. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. How famous a poem did that become! Quite, and it’s far less than quiet. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” And then most people do not realize there are actually more words after that. Hell, they often cannot get past “madness”.
So sad.
Mad-

6. Madness. Another form of expression in poetry. Was Percy Shelley mad? “Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight/ No more--Oh, never more!” (From "Lament"). Jim Morrison certainly was mad; in his An American Prayer: "All join now and lament for the death of my cock a tongue of knowledge in the feathered night." Absolutely brilliant; brilliant madness! "Lying on stained wretched sheets with a bleeding virgin. We can plan a murder or start a religion."

7. Plan a murder.

8.(or) Start a religion! Might just be a little Charlie Manson and Dionysus in there. We certainly followed him like ravaging nymphs, getting stoned immaculate and wasted on his words of wisdom... drunk, dying on the vine. And then he died in some back street Paris hotel.

9. Or was it a murder? Is he the Elvis everyone sees at the Texas gas stations?

10. Poetry is vertigo. Always spinning...

11. I write poetry in all kinds of places; sitting in a small lazy Wednesday afternoon park in Carlton on Lygon Street smoking a kretek cigarette while writing words on the back of an Andrew’s Bookshop receipt because I forgot my damn notebook! Cars passing by like snakes hissing or the howling of the wind.

12. Poems howl! Poems cry. Poems make me laugh and wonder “why?” (Why was Poe found dead drunk and alone... why is a book like Ephemerealms not found next to anything by Auden’s (except, perhaps, on my own personal bookshelf?).

13. Poems are like ghosts. People sometimes read them. Sometimes they are glimpsed again, like streets with no names. They are dust words less frozen in time unless accompanied by music... I see all these little poetry creatures wandering lost in a world full of books where they are not welcomed, so they sit in corners and crumble or cry; or they sit in all-night diners like Jack Kerouac in desolation, feeling the misery of the mystery and the mist. Feeling the dead naked blues of the streets; the cold saxophone bones of night.

14. Blown by the wind, poems turn into rust.

15. Poor little creatures.

16. If I had a poem for every piece of shit music I’ve ever heard on the radio I’d have a large pocket full of change and turn the world “Green”. No. I’m sure I could do something bigger than that. I’d put a “poem”, like Saint Nick does w/ toys, in the pockets of every living person and they’d have no choice but to read that poem over and over and over until it stuck inside their skulls like music...

17. ...then they’d go out and buy a book of poetry.

18. Jewel put some words together in a book (“A Night Without Armor”) of what she calls ‘poetry’. Well, it’s not the best bit of poetry ever, but it’d be nice if more famous people wrote poetry books. Maybe poems would have a chance. Dylan wrote “Tarantula” (but that’s a little bit too far of left field for the average mind; possibly any mind). Lou Reed has a nice collection, as does Patti Smith and Henry Rollins, but that’s still just not enough for the general public.

19. Instead, poems are just little slices of life. Carved into our hearts then forgotten. Like car crashes (no, car crashes are always remembered). Car-crashes are more like poems, actually. “Crash” (originally in "The Atrocity Exhibition") from J. G. Ballard is a great book, reads like poetry. Made into a Cronenberg film, even. Most people who have seen that film do not know it was ever a book; a thing with words between the front and back covers. (I have a nice little copy... but bloody Hell! I like reading Ballard.)

20. “Roses are red, violence is blue. I saw you dead, with the ducks at the zoo.” Now that really sucks. Ducks aren’t even kept in zoos! They might hang around there, looking for crumbs or poetry, but they are there on their own. Like squirrels at The Boston Commons. Nibbling on all those little lost poems, the poems that fall off the trees or out of newspapers or from the mouths of arguing lovers fighting over whether or not they should see this film or that film; all along a little bug poem is tugging at their pant legs saying, “read me, please.” The boy plucks a rose from a bush gives it to the girl they go off to some hotel instead and that poor little bug poem is left there like a mistake.

21. What the hell kind of bloody poem is this? I had an idea, but it fell out of my head so instead I’m writing this strange bit of delirium, this transcendent burn of the fantastical romances of my heart. No, that’s not it either.

22. REM on the radio, I turned to the TV pages. There were eleven green dragons flying out from my self-conscious. I saw a world inhabited by Raindogs. Cats were hiding in all the shadows, hiding with their poems because on that Raindog Planet poems were outlawed and Cats were less than zero. “Can’t get There From Here.” And then I wake up in a strange hotel, a red neon sign flickering outside, my head hurting like film-noir narration.

23. I did. I was born (like Dickens’ David Copperfield). I was bored. I wrote a poem and it turned into a wooden piano. “Pardon?” someone said thru the watery nimbus of the rain. Sitting in the back of a taxi, U2 on the radio. But the poem was halfway out the door...

24. “ The heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground/ But there's no room, no space to rent in this town...”

25. And then I saw her standing on the street corner, stuck in the moment. I thought of all the most beautiful women in the world, from Brigitte Bardot to Vanessa Paradis, and saw that they were all poems. This one was no different. The rain clung to her dress like words from the pages of Edward Estlin Cummings ...E. E. Cummings. All those avant-garde sonnets, from the blues form and acrostics of love. And nature. Like sketches, and paintings.

26. The odd typography or punctuation: this is how her dress flowed...

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

27. “Loneliness,” I breathed, gently like leaves fallen. Almost a whisper. “If strangers meet
life begins-

28. “anyone lived in a pretty how town/ (with up so floating many bells down).”

29. She had green eyes, every different kind of poem was in them. I followed her down like a bell sound, a tintinnabulation into that “rabbit’s hole” down into the subway basement of the old Alice Hotel. She said there was a whole new world where people read poems everyday. “No, they are poems. Each person has a poem memorized inside their head and everywhere is like a café in Paris or Prague. Wanna come along?”

30. Of course, so I did.

Epilogue:

E1. In the end I became Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”


*for Purr, because she thought
"Bug Dallas"
was going to be something
about
lit
(ti
ny)tle
crea
(bu
gs)tures...

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