scarecrow poetics/essays

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Welcome to Peckham . . .

Monday Morning

I slept straight
through my alarm
and woke at 10am
in fact I hadn’t
even set it
to go off.
I jumped out of
bed and peeked
through the blinds
and saw two
men doing the
junkie shuffle
through the grey
Monday morning.
Christ!
I thought
even the junkies
aren’t as lazy
as I am
these days.

The First Night Of Snow

There were three murders at the weekend.
Then last night I awoke at 3am and it was freezing. I looked out the window to see a policeman and a policewoman chasing a car thief along the street and into the park. The policewoman was not what you would call thin, but man she was quick.
She caught up with him and as she made an arrest, it immediately started delicately snowing for the first time this winter.
It was like a textbook idyllic chocolate box scene, all those flashing blue lights, barking dogs, out-of-breath policemen and silent snowdrops falling across London.

How I Made My Millions

It was a hot day and I was sitting in the park.
when suddenly it came to me, just like that:
Sweet pizzas! You must invent, manufacture
and market sweet pizzas! Just think about it
for a minute. Combining the public’s love of
pizza and cake, you can’t lose. And consider
the potential in variations. Blueberry jam and
mascarpone. Maple and pecan. Hot fudge and
chocolate. Mmm. I jumped up and punched
the air with delight. I was going to be rich. Rich!

Killer Right Hook

I grabbed my camera and walked to the park to capture the pink winter sunset but two school girls were kicking holy fuck out of one another in the midst of a baying throng of about fifteen boys and girls in loosened Friday evening uniforms so I waded in and tried to tear them apart but they were pulling each other’s hair and swinging fists, eventually they were prised apart when another girl bit one of their hands and as they broke away, one of them, a chubby black girl with bloodied teeth and wild eyes, let out a killer right jab to my mouth and I had to hand it to her, it was a good precise punch, and the throng took a collective intake of breath but the fight was over, the girls were all out of punch and after a while they all kind of drifted apart and went their separate ways until there was just me left standing there in the mud, rubbing my swollen jaw and wondering what had just happened. The pink sun had set. It was dark. It was December. My thirtieth year.

Peckham Sunset

A sunset over Safeway
presents itself like
a medal worn proudly

around the neck
of a great Olympiad;
a once-rippling Greek God

who has now fallen, crippled,
clinging to his memories
like he clings to his mottled medal.

View Of The Park From The Window

two men deftly slice the top from
an aluminum can dug out from the
litter bin below my window
turned sideways and fill it with
water to smock their crack through
as Carla, the Eastern European
Jehovah-seller buzzes my intercom
for the third time in a week;
this is not a literary imagining
or a memorable incident or
anything that matters to me but
it is the truth of a Monday morning
living in reality, Tuesday 23rd Jan.

Quote Carved Into Concrete With Stick On Peckham Pavement

To sleep,
perchance
to dream!

Ben Myers © 2007.

I'm a street fighting writer, pugilist poet and hapless fly-fisherman. I have published a number of books and am a founder member of Captains Of Industry record label and The Brutalists (www.myspace.com/brutalists). I write lyrics for The Gulag. More details can be found: www.benmyers.com. My fiction has appeared in a number of collections and websites such as 3AM, Dogmatika, Zygote In My Coffee, Straight From The Fridge, Bookmunch, Blatt, LaurdHird.com, Dreams The Money Can Buy, Open Wide etc. I have also been known to write for publications such as Kerrang!, Alternative Press, Time Out, Plan B, Q, Bizarre, DrownedInSound, Melody Maker (RIP), Playlouder, Record Collector etc. I have nearly 3000 friends, and they all hang out in my one-room flat every night. I dream of apostrophes. I'm broke.

posted by scarecrow # 7:34 AM

Shit From An Old Notebook . . .

Say It With Flowers

fuck off
and leave
me alone

ornately arranged
by our
instore professionals.

In Hollywood

I heard that some of them bleach their arseholes.

Horoscope

Capricorn. Same as last month, only with Aries rising on the third Thursday you will experience a sense of déjà vu. Maybe you won’t know even know about it, but it’ll happen alright. Seek the stranger in the Wellington boots. Watch a Vin Diesel movie together.

Her Favourite Cheeses

haloumi
gouda
feta
emmenthal
dick

Confession #24

I like to
secretly watch
voyeurs.

ZZ Top

In England we should really call them Zed Zed Top

Celebricide

I’m scared
to leave
the house
in case
i accidentally
become famous.

Examination Question

Two prostitutes are walking down the street
towards one another. One is traveling at
3mph and the other has Chlamydia. Which
one is thinking about how accurate Pretty
Woman was in terms of authenticity? Your
answer should refer to Virilio’s urbanist theories.

Redhead

Your hair is so red and so long I want to throw a bucket of water over you every time you pass me on the street. I mean, that fire comes all the way down past your ass. You’re like a superior sequel to The Towering Inferno, where everyone lives happily ever after.

Myopia

Here kitty kitty
here kitty -
oh, it’s a
handbag.

Redundant Greek Gods

Herpes
Isosceles
Dunlop
Pessary
Biff
Pissoir
Bacchus-Bob Jr

Semantics

Unless the girls I’ve known have been doing it wrong, I still don’t understand why they’re called ‘blow jobs’.

Ben Myers © 2007.

posted by scarecrow # 7:29 AM

Sunday, March 11, 2007

The poet after forty . . .

For years, decades, I’ve struggled to break thru—
in my writing, in my life

And now I’m finally doing it, growing up, learning
to understand my pain and how to forgive
my family

and the women who’ve hurt me and myself for letting
them hurt me, while suddenly finding the confidence
to lay down the cleanest line I can

But now that I’m arriving at this new, well-lit place
I’m finding that there’s no one here
to greet me

Most of my family is dead, the vast majority of my friends
have disappeared into marriages, careers, jobs, and mindsets
I simply cannot understand, old girlfriends are too far away
in every respect for renewed sparks or even mutual apologies,
the new girls are too young and losing interest in my graying
temples at the same rate I’m losing interest in their adolescent
needs, and the older women who are still free are available
mainly because they’re crazy in all the wrong ways or
bitter divorcées or both, unfit of course for a budding poet
learning for once to love life and growing younger
by the minute …

So here I am, more alive than ever and on many more nights
than not alone with my keyboard, a book, or an Angels’ game
on the radio, pacing my apartment like a caged animal,
desperate for someone willing to let me tell them
how profoundly happy I’ve become …

Robert Woodard © 2007.

ROB WOODARD was born in Anaheim, California in 1964 and raised mostly in the nearby Long Beach area. After graduating high school, he dropped in and out of various community colleges and worked mostly in restaurants in southern California, Hawaii, and Australia, while taking breaks to wander aimlessly across big swaths of the globe. During these years he wrote consistently in search of his voice as a writer. Frustrated by his lack of progress, he returned to school and eventually obtained bachelors and masters degrees in anthropology from California State University, Long Beach. After a brief stint as a college professor, he returned to working in restaurants and writing. Burning Shore Press recently published Heaping Stones, his first novel. What Love Is, his second novel, is scheduled to be released by the same house in the summer/early fall of 2006. He is currently writing poetry, book reviews, and a journal.

Contact: bsp@burningshorepress.com

posted by scarecrow # 6:56 AM

Dancing in the Louvre—Summer, 1999

For Katie Farrar

I’d heard it called the Disneyland of art museums
and when I saw its slick ticket windows
and long lines I understood why

but inside the art refuse to be regulated,
codified, or sold:

instead
it jumped off the walls and danced,
sang, screamed, laughed arias,
spewed witticisms,
and hurt like
cold mornings
with no hope
of her ever
returning

And I danced too in my thoughtful
standing still and slow moving from
one painting to the next
as Vermeer egged me on
by saying shit like ride me to
van Gogh like a magic carpet
on your way to Jackson Pollock’s
Long Island barn
early 1950s breathru

or maybe you should shift gears
slightly to Munch leading to Klee
or anywhere else modern, post,
or not you want to go

Or perhaps you should just say
fuck it all
and head down to
the Italian Renaissance
and weep before the
fields of sunlight and
God having meaning
in Leonardo’s backdrop
or so many other greats
my overwhelmed mind
suddenly can’t name
by name

which is what
I then proceeded
to do,

tears coming to my eyes
before I even reached
the stairs

Robert Woodard © 2007.

posted by scarecrow # 6:54 AM

New Wild Boys . . .

I don’t want to walk into the William S. Burroughs
wide-screen gunfighter drama of pulled-down fedora
and secret agent cabalistic webs of no possible
meaning, of secrets held close like a lover just
deceased while helicopter blades rotate ominously
over a desert town and Mexicanos locos
working for the man slip in and out of
knife-drawn shadows of
Big Texas Lawman America
Saudi Oil
South African Diamonds
and deeply concealed interstellar invaders
as small packs of poets wander the hills
like guerilla warriors wearing
Henry David Thoreau T-shirts and stolen Nikes
doing whatever they can to be heard

The sun and the sea are mine too
and I demand they be returned—
a million murdered presidents later
or now doesn’t matter:

because I, one the poets, am not a beginning but simply another
American expression of something much older that can never
quite go away—

so I can just wait you out
if need be

Robert Woodard © 2007.

posted by scarecrow # 6:51 AM

A Pretty Typical Day . . .

I woke up yesterday as a curly-haired young Bob Dylan,
all charming and profound and full of life—pre-media
almost and really just learning
how to write a song

But the day turned out to be filled with all sorts of obstacles:
a leaky showerhead, a dead battery in my truck, a nasty email
from an ex-love I finally admitted I still loved
more than a little bit …

And so by around noon (mainly because of memories stoked
by her) I’d very much shifted into Iggy Pop mode:
howling
crazed craziness
with where are the drugs
and the love needs expression
taking over
to the point where for little spots of time
here and there I really thought I might die
and that that might be OK, even while I
most definitely was enjoying my pain …

Until around two when I managed to get some of my strength back
and mutated into a snidey Johnny Rotten semi-bucked-tooth
scowl-and-glare guy, more English than I’d before ever imagined
I could be (but in reality mostly just a pose, not quite me)

I then somehow turned into Bono for a while: self-important,
all knowing and all loving and holier than any Thou—powered
by a profound foolishness and a deep down shame of
what I’d become and was becoming …

By around four in the afternoon the overall trauma of the day
encouraged me to slip into a full-on Lou Reed reality:
speedy and paranoid leave me the fuck alone black leather “toughness,”
while of course demanding that everyone acknowledge that I’m still
king of the pack, still way better than they could ever be …

But events suddenly allowed me to pull myself
out of this mood too:

I found a five-dollar bill in the gutter by my apartment building
and then several minutes later, as I was walking down the street,
a beautiful young Mexican girl smiled at me,
warm and truthful and happy—

and because of these events, I suddenly became all clean
melodic Joey Ramone geek-style happiness inside despite
my outer weak points,
a state that lasted until I got
into bed that night …

It was a pretty typical day in other words, a day that caused me
to realize (as days like this usually do) that in many ways
I’m an amazingly romantic man:

I’ve always believed in poets

and believed that they
should sing

Robert Woodard © 2007.

posted by scarecrow # 6:49 AM

Love Poem Much Delayed . . .

I’ll take with me to the grave the way your
dark brown eyes sparkled and smiled up at me
thru unruly black curls as your barely
seventeen-year-old mouth gleefully sucked
on my twenty-nine-year-old dick
with surprising skill and testicle-lapping
daring well beyond your years,

as well the excitement I could feel rumbling thru
every part of you the first time I pulled your panties
to one side and reciprocated with my tongue …

Shit, I’ll take it all with me!—

The hours of kissing and caressing in which we engaged,
before and in between fucking sessions; the long talks
we had on books and politics and just about everything
else under the sun; the time we spent just lying in bed
watching movies or TV; the amazing way you would
hang around my apartment naked, cooking, reading,
or whatever, apparently never even thinking about
putting your clothes on again until you had to
go somewhere; the cute way you’d giggle and
scream when I would unexpectedly slap your
bare butt while you walked across a room;
the strange guilty pang I’d always feel
when you did or said something that made me
realize that no matter how smart or unusually
mature you were for your age, you were still
a very young girl indeed …

Yes, I’ll take all this with me and more—for these
many years later I’m finally realizing that of all the women
who have flown from my life you’re the one I miss most:

because though I may have loved others longer
and more powerfully, you were the one I loved most
simply, with the least amount of thought or need
for understanding or justification

And because of this, the pain of your departure
still exists deep within me; I still can sometimes relive
with sad accuracy the day you told me, without warning
it seemed, that you didn’t want to grow up this fast,
that you wanted to be a teenage girl for a bit longer …

The irony of course is that within a year you were
knocked up by a guy five years your senior and were
forced to grow up much faster than you ever would
have had to with a dreamer poet of
arrested adolescence such as me …

I’m not sure why this has all come back to me
so strongly as of late—but the truth is that suddenly
I’ve been wishing more than a little bit that I would
have been the guy who left the condoms in the drawer
and that I now had an eleven-year-old son, some sort of
relationship with you still, and a life very different
from the one that’s led me to the warm nostalgia
of this lonely poem to you.

Robert Woodard © 2007.

posted by scarecrow # 6:40 AM

Celebrity Slumber . . .

Celebrity Slumber [1]

I was on some sort of holiday; hadn’t been home yet and was nervous about what father would say about my absence. The blinds were long, metal and drawn. A school girl was staring at me intently from within an ongoing lesson as I idly killed time in the hallway. Her eyes still intent on me, I went back and tried to phone home from one of the plethora of telephones on the window sill: an old cordless, a rotary phone with an enormous, oversized dial – all had been unplugged or sat with frayed cords. Father was going to be pissed . . . I sat watching webpages silently scroll and flicker past in loud colors. My name was not on any of them. Bill Gates appeared between each one on an infomercial set with a thirty-eight jeweled necklace . . . Bill Gate’s Thirty-Eight Jewels, Bill Gates Thirty-Eight Jewels, Bill Gates Thirty-Eight Jewels . . .

Celebrity Slumber [2]

Pavarotti needed help with the zipper on the side of his suit, which had gotten stuck in the teeth and Russians were busy terrorizing the globe’s hot air balloon travel (two explosions already this week. The wreckage, on the small color TV in the lobby, of snapped cords, people bent double over the whicker or possibly crumpled there). The interior of a hotel with sodium lighting and a washed out pastel blue running the length of the corridor, seen from across a vector, from the outside as it were. A lone room service waiter stood in front of a closed door as in a Hopper painting. Again the Muscovite terrorists - this time making voice-over demands over cut-aways of gaseous explosions.

Celebrity Slumber [3]

Tony Soprano pulled me into another room, and turned on some music to avoid being overheard by the feds who had bugged his house. No sooner had we begun to converse when a drop top caddy rolled up and started spraying the place. We made for the back door and circled around . . . (Somewhere in Europe now) . . . And got into a convertible limo at the end of the block, slowly drove by the would-be assassin marking his appearance. Ada was there with us and we began to discuss our options when a trio of Hawaiians approached us with a map of islands, and pointed out that our aggressor was a Maori – promising us more details when we reached Honolulu. Tony pumped them for more info, going along with the ploy and elbowing me with a conspirator’s wink which spoke silently of an imminent double cross.

Judson Hamilton lives in Wroclaw, Poland. More of his work can be found at www.identitytheory.com, www.pastsimple.org, and is forthcoming at www.thievesjargon.com.

posted by scarecrow # 6:31 AM