Poetry

     It’s unlikely that the caravan is going to get to you at all. You’re sitting under a date palm with Jean Genet. “When slaves make love,” he says, “they’re really doing something else.”      ”What?” you’re about to ask him, when the words of Vauvenargues come to you. `It is equally a sign of weakness to…

In Rio de Janeiro, dozens of new sambas are composed for each year’s Carnival. Although sambas concerning love outnumber all others, there are always some about world events, such as landing on the moon, and Brazilian politics and life in general. This sampling from 1965, a year after the “rightest” revolution, comments on, or pokes…

508. And behold! There were blossoms in the wind, and there were blossoms in the moving letters of the death warrant, and the wind moved them not, for behold the wind was stayed in its course, and there were flocks in the river, crossing the river, and the river moved against them, and behold no…

I feel that I should introduce myself. I am X, a not very unusual person, A rather ordinary specimen of human life. At the moment I feel that I serve no purpose, Which is why I am here—I want to feel useful. Also, I find mental hospitals interesting. And I do hope you will find…

     Tom and Nancy were walking along the esplanade.      ”You see that guy walking ahead of us, with the shorts on? The one with so much hair on his legs. You know, I’d been looking at that guy for at least five minutes before I realized that he was also wearing a pair of black nylon…

A lump in your groin. A burning in your discharge. You cannot quit the cigarettes or the entire nights spent refining the pointless game of billiards. Setting the smoke of drugs adrift on the afternoon light, you salvage up a time perhaps when spring made a car look great and mascaraed girls from the lunchroom…

Life was cheap in South America. Anything could happen there. That was one way. He was tired. That was another. So many of his erotic daydreams began that way. He’d lie in his bed and masturbate, usually just before he got up. Many of them had to do with the way they’d survive after an…

(In memory of Victor Jara) No! white bird you’re no dove, no sign, you are an albino pigeon shitting on skyscrapers, citizens, monuments; you’ll never sing to me of lemonade & hard cider.* They broke both his hands bone after bone after bone that, swallows once, filttered over quick strings to start the children singing;…

Here there is violence: she waits on simple blue not innocent, not unaware, sprawled, random, nude. The ambiguities of her air all gathered in and pent emerge as rose and scarlet. Rage takes its attitude.