Poems I wrote in 1997 or so

1. i have beheaded the teddy bear that was in your bed and which you were given as a baby. i’m sorry. it was so obese so stuffed and so happy. 2. i have removed the breast implants that were in your sister and which landed her an appearance on baywatch. forgive me. they were so smooth so rubbery and so soft.

silence

the low steady hum of streetlights on suburban snow dunes

lacks the city's punctuation -

the passing cars

and sirens

dump trucks

and street cleaners -

the passing cars slide by the buzzing houses humming with boiler rooms and refrigerators

the low steady hum of streetlights over the dunes.

over the dunes past the houses

the crackling car radio fades -

the car slides by humming like a suburban streetlight

over the snowdrift sands of the desert hills

riding the gentle curves

the belly drop dips

of the snowdrift sands -

the passing car glides by the solemn joshua trees

like a siren.

(I cower under the snowy overhang

as the windswept newspaper man glides by -

whirring past the boiling buzzing streetlights

abiding the dunes

the skids and dips -

I shrink and dip into the dawn darkness with no escape from

the slow steady hum of streetlights on suburban snow dunes.)

Vote Obama - (George) Clinton 2008:One Nation Under a Groove

In his search for a running mate, Barack Obama is purportedly looking for someone to balance out his perceived weaknesses and to convince ardent Hillary supporters to back him. Some key attributes of the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate are age, experience, and the ability to attract key constituencies. At the same time, the running mate should bolster Obama's message of change and should not represent the "old politics" against which he runs. So whom should he pick?

George Clinton (if he'll give up the funk). Clinton will soon be 67 years old and has led Parliament (and Funkadelic). In addition to this invaluable experience, he will easily reach out to the key constituencies that Obama is failing to attract; uneducated, white voters and hardcore Clinton supporters will readily vote for whatever Clinton they see on the ticket. The other battleground in most elections is said to be the "swing" voters, but that's clearly the politics of the past. Aside from the resurgence of swing in the 1990s (marked by such groups as the Brian Setzer Orchestra and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies), swing was a thing of the 1940s. While McCain courts the all-but-dead "swing" vote, he won't even hold a flashlight to the Obama-Clinton funk vote. It'll be atomic, dog.

Vote Obama-(George) Clinton 2008: One Nation Under a Groove.

On Poetry, Pleasure, and Punctuation:A Chat with J. Roscoe

A: that semi-colon really rubs me the wrong way.

B: what would rub you the right way?

A: probably a comma... or some moist orifice.

B: hahaha... hrmmmm ill try putting it in a moist orifice.

A: you definitely should, although i'm not sure if you meant "putting IT in..." or "putting in..."

B: oh, whoops.

A: but you should give it a go either way.

B: well if the moist orifice doesnt work, i think im gonna favor the semicolon over the comma. it precedes a complete independent clause; a comma would create a comma splice. even if we don't care about grammar in poetry, i think it would send the wrong signal to the reader, who might think that "I" am also learned by rote.

A: "where every place is a line in the poem, / learned by rote" isn't an independent clause.

B: oh, i see what causes the problem... what precedes that part of the poem makes an independent clause.

A: ah! problem solved. still, i'd like your poetry to include more moist orifices and less semi-colons.

B: my poetry contains plenty of moist orifices; this is a rare poem that doesn't. now that you mention it, what preceedes the semicolon is not in fact an independent clause and i dont like the first semicolon in that stanza for the reason you mentioned. it shall be replaced with a moist orifice.

A: fantastic! glad to have an influence on your work. i gotta go to the airport now, but i do hope to "talk" to you again soon. ciao, dog chow.

B: cat chow.

* * *

Visit J. Roscoe & D. Feinstein's blog for great writing and deep thoughts.

For more on the rise of the semi-colon, read this New York Times article.

Other punctuation articles worth reading include:
-this New Yorker article against Eats, Shoots & Leaves
-this AP article on the problems with apostrophes, hyphens, and spaces in surnames today

"Horny old redhead toying twat with dildo": Found Poetry / Spam Filter Failure

"Sweet teen jamming her dildo
Holiday evening group sex in the club
Nude Cindy posing in bedroom
Cute teen posing in nylon
Outdoor hardcored nice girl"

* * *

The late Bern Porter published a book of Found Poems, which the writer of this blog has not read.

There is also a book of found poetry that includes excerpts from Donald Rumsfeld, like the following poem:

Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

"Horny old redhead toying twat with dildo" is much better, though.

Dead Cat, Deadcat

While more and more biology students today are finding themselves in the sterile, formaldehyde-free, digital dissection environments of the computer age, the demand for old-fashioned-style, interactive dead cats is as high as ever. And a dead cat isn't as cheap as one might think; limited research reveals that there's a virtually endless supply of live cats available for free adoption, but a dead cat can run upwards of forty USD a pop.

That same forty-plus dollars could also buy a deadcat, a device whose etymological origins can only lead back to the thought of sticking a boom mic up a dead cat's ass. The deadcat, or wind muff, typically has no lingering formaldehyde stench and can be used to protect a microphone from wind gusts again and again, whereas a reeking dead cat can only be effectively dissected once. Sure, a dead cat provides days (if not weeks) of incisionary pleasure and comes with its own replaceable damp fur coat casing if you slice it right, but please leave out the space when you bring your deadcat to set.

* * *

A live ferret steals a mic cover in this CNN video.

To buy a deadcat, visit this site.

To buy a dead cat, visit this site.

To see videos of a dissection online, visit this site.

Here is another online cat dissection lab.

Metaguild Manifesto

We are emblematic of the enigmatic,
mating creations evading relations,
capturing, constructing, releasing, revealing.
Cutting out a letter here,
shutting up, a longing stare,
shouting out clear and bare:
shed a tear, rip a tear,
cut it up, there is no repair
for a numb clit, dumb shit.

Aligning with signs that bind,
we spout in black against this light.
We fight with words in flight over contextual fright,
the runaway freight of consensual, conventional might.
We damn straight and far right.
We fuck off and gun fights.
We wake in sleep, die alive,
bleeding gradations seep astray:
sticks shift, stones stick,
food feeds, floats weep
outside asleep at the rainy creep parade.

We recklessly play in trash heaps today
adrift in the necklace cosmos,
sensing vents in the text, citing the trace,
venting the text in a sense. We cannot erase
in haste, hiding our unforeseen waste
in faceless places where the lens resorts to aquamarine;
resorts, debased, to a sound bite race
to raise a flag and a toilet, to clean
the shirt store's dirt poor and keep the dirty unseen;

Resorts to a thong and its whispered song
in a well-creased airplane magazine,
a meaningless sarong suspended in space
like an arbitrary planet or an unplanned tangerine:
a juicy, orange phenomenon.
We think, therefore we are wrong.
We cannot be. Wander on,
curious friends, and welcome
to the metaguild. It is what it is.
(Smack!)

* * *

Note: The Metaguild was conceived without prior knowledge of the the World of Warcraft MetaGuild. The author of the above manifesto and all the content on this site has no affiliation with, nor knowledge pertaining to, World of Warcraft. This disclaimer has been placed here primarily in hopes that World of Warcraft aficionados will stumble upon the enlightening ideas propagated by this Metaguild. Enough said.