Cento from Dorothea Lasky part II

In Brighton, MA I cannot lie, I felt the hope
in the summer sun.

"Now this is the truth" we all thought.
Scratch its head. It is holy.

So says you & you know nothing.
This is a world where there are monsters

which in bright red
lived a lot of different kinds of lives.

Inside my heart, there is a rat who
for your your kind of love

in the middle of the night I wake & I am cold all over.
Like a small business

I eat the world lovingly, too.
I hate language & yes, I hate you

with my bloody mouth.
The great event which is beauty

melting the things in the room
& I, in the light of the candles

is lost forever & replaced by the unreal.
I had almost forgotten I was a poet.

I was a philosopher:
follow me, I know everything.

We kissed each other lovingly for the very first time.

Cento from Dorothea Lasky Part I

My soul was a man & like a man
I make a toast to me, my friend.
& now when you see a man six feet tall,
& he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide

with a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night,
I understand, I want to kill myself now.
Some have described
the real self

growing ever so slightly from his forehead.
There is shit on my hands;
this is how it feels when you talk to me.
The flowers scattered themselves everywhere.

Now there is something between me &
the heart of me, bursting within itself!
Don't you think that is sad, that here
is noisy with light. The blackbirds are

so in love with anyone --
perhaps it is chemistry that
was bright & blue & plastic.
& death was untuned to them & he made them an unlikely hole

of a great eternity, too large to even be
unlikely & mean.
I mean to say
a serious mistake: the universe is unlikely.

Cento Before Dinner (from Jack Spicer) II

& so we walked, uneasy, wondering
enough to want to start backward.
I think I'm going to be sick.
The hands unclench, the trembling legs go loose --
what wasn't, what undoes, what will not happen
lost somewhere between Hell & Texas.
Under a sun bright like a broken promise,
the boxers face each other. They pretend
we fell unloved, like frozen fields of snow.
The word is slow & rigid in its pace.
I closed my lying heart against his lips
& sometimes I can almost see
the citizens come out to help the strangers.
What have I lost? The trees were full of birds.
I turn & place my hand upon your groin.
I hear the seagulls call. They're going west;
that gleam like God's own candles in the sun. Nothing
lets beautiful black fingers snap the last one
when I poke my fingers into her. I can see it
from the middle distance of another room:
the dancer that puts birthdays in motion.

Cento Before Dinner (from Jack Spicer)

We waited & the blue skies writhed awhile
to keep the time in. But the songs are mine.

Men & women have weddings & funerals.
I watch, as others watched, but cannot stand

around, around, a convoluting day
draped loosely in my bed.

An angel pacing down Hollywood, wings folded
as ink on paper: it will be no picture, no tourist postcard

will find its rest
while the heart twists.

You want to web the rivers of the world.
You have picked the wrong flower.

We find that eyes in kissing stammer
& so we walked, uneasy, wondering.

Cento from Chris Tonelli

Each introduction
is strong -- a simple mask. I am
in the objectless air.

There are so few ways
to escape, no
telling the truth.

I was born;
objects exist
where memory

does not exist.
The thing in the air
never happened.

We've evolved beyond
potential love.
This is the goal -- to be

the only thing possible.

Cento from Graham Foust

A new year's clumsy gallows-
word for dead:
something someone would say.

My neighbors cough &
you get the picture.
I move around

the very best places to kill
to this place
I will always never

touch when I so want to. That is,
move. I like the way I'm still.
Compelled to pretend, I get

things when in pain.
There are only ever breaks
for a little rearview mirror

a skin's-width,
maybe.
Between the street

I never could have made
breathing people in
& that great gospel jest,

a sound somewhere
could know wisdom's cut.
Capacity -- I guess that's just

dread,
a whole night's worth.
& other than our memory

of blood,
I've been having
the most difficult beautiful

I do. I do
your new brain
& you can't notice

I am not safe.
You saw me
ashen. Face was knocked

by one hand.
As a mouth
of moon, your smile,

your hand
like a bladder.
Bored totem,

the grass spasms open,
or in a corner
you care for me,

bruised. & doubt lit up
that which hasn't
its own ceremony.

The revolution, too, is sad
like it's a mirror.
The last of

pain, quietly made,
unlocked into air. There.

coffee robot

from slashfood

Cento from Realpoetik & Linebreak

Halved by prisms, the multiple
cacophonies of need, a river, swells, above sound are the

favors of one slight puff, some 30 years his junior.
A jar. Rain & saliva become

snakes. Snakes
suggest ear plugs at night --

New York City
blossoming. O wide wind seers, cirrus-drafts of curving

mea culpa. What was I doing trapped
at the edge of the world? On Maarifa Street, children dream of a new

earth & the earth which forces it to freedom, the tongue of
heels ascending a ladder.

Cento from Realpoetik

Past the grime-caked windows
the sound of a piano
from the briers. Sour, bitter

music. Myron has a stub of charcoal.
Far off, the front door bangs.
He eats his rations, & after,

tea. Wreak after wreck. Month,
one hour, another. The wilderness in you
a country. It stretched its rationality out:

a pitched roof to stop rain ruining, guide our
I-don't-know-who-I-am-right-now
at first; & then the eyes adjust.

When eternally the earth
up against the window,
alone in a blue vacuum,

curled in hurling its
smog over glass songs,
spills into my skin & paints my veins, even

thoughts stern on the faces of sailors.

in the mail

yesterday, some goodies:
Jill Alexander Essbaum's Necropolis (thanks jill!).

Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest Swift Passerine
Mark Yakich's The Making of Collateral Beauty

Sawbuck 3.2

is ready to go: www.sawbuckpoetry.blogspot.com

Corey Mesler
David Sewell
Erik Anderson
Gina Abelkop
Jennifer Fortin
Joseph Wood
Kate Schapira
Kristina Marie Darling
Nick Demske
Paul Hostovsky

hope you like!

~samuel

Cento from Chelsea 81 (part 2)

Where he'd followed his father's work --
randomness & space, smiling in bright light --
Keats had a little slice of the cosmic

lucky. & who'll bet on luck?
Searching in the painting or the mirror
to find, like a blind man turning towards her

house of muscle & breath & violin,
one white stone hidden in the hand, wisteria blooming.
When stillness goes electric,

a hundred pallid fields ignite,
sharp-angled from the earth.
Behind the window, the little boy watches.

Cento from Chelsea 81 (part 1)

These thirty years, revised, destroyed
pools, this island of Guernsey; we stand as
ancestral knots adrift. No remainder
in the glass you just gave me. It was all
what we mistake it to have been.
It is in this exact moment
years sing by. Father, do you recall the time
I broke my strings, spit my teeth
through the story, far off.
At my window, the cold trees opened
the deeds that shone through your sweat.
A lever to raise from ashes the
sounds of splashing water.
How is it that sunlight consoles?
The plan is to spend the light
that makes them bold, your bones,
the facts like bones & the photographs of bones.
A man's blind trunk without arms & legs is
hoary as frost now, your eyes all clouded
in that bickering land that once resounded,
that will not let you breathe. Farewell, my friend.

Cento from Arts & Letters Spring 2007

I do not remember this. I was a child
in the darkness, a winged rustling; & later
brilliant red & yellow. & grief, certainly,

is very matter-of-fact: warm bodies (monkeys
for days). Nevertheless,
things weren't always bad.

Something enters by the small window
because, let's face it, sometimes words drift too far off.
I don't know how to get back there now

said an ancient theory of medicine.
Looking at it, did he actually leave
the slow mule of my heart?

All afternoon, his back deep in the grass, he lay there
sun-bronzed,
moving more and more like fiction.

Cento from March 2009 Boxcar Poetry Review

A hive living in the ribcage of a raccoon

deeper than what our fathers' called

"our lips on his fingertips"

adds up all of what you are most afraid of.

Lord, take what you've come for.

We needed the dramatic beginning.

It was a nice touch, it was, to erase

how to retreat. I want nothing to do with it.

I've driven more nails into the leaning porch

unnamed. Unnoticed, more is coming. It snows.

Cento from Sir! Issue 2

Without will, there is no
time & axis, the flock

littler than I am.
Throbbing like the throat of a bird,

I know he puts his hand somewhere
that can never be found,

in a different neighborhood.
Don't fear repetition.

Remember what he made --
the ground looks strange. Like fields of white;

like nothing had happened.
In the future

we found them again,
saying it's over.

A surprise of sand & wind --
of all the unifying elements in a best friend's camera.

Even if we feel
I know my name at last,

the rain was getting in
& you will come out.

Cento from Brandi Homan 3/9/09 & 3/16/09 (in hospital & out)

Like when a friend of a friend was drunk
for me. A man who smells like

blossoms bleached
purrs with the dyskinesia of atoms. Telepathy
of bleeding fingers. Feet firmly on the ground.

I'm looking for love
with exotic postmarks,

coated with afterglow until I glisten
scarlet. Your pink wig
above us. Someday,

they'll cut off your hands
in a bright red dress.

We all should be so tended
we all turn to pumpkins at midnight.
Sometimes I wear stockings

red as rising heat,
although I promised otherwise.

My grudges, tiny bludgeons
coated in dust -- life beating us
for giving until nothing remains.

Cento from Brandi Homan

Not once have I thought I could be saved
alone -- one who comes out
in the red dress dancing on her own
behind the bucking chute

and says hush-hush-hush.
Like ointment, you're slippery
on my tongue, magic to molecules.
Get your truck & a gun

& loving you is like living.
Load & thrust to reduce
mercury, beautiful poison. I want
& already the world --

whose name is quicksilver --
sinkholes. I became acolyte.
Roots, they evangelize for distortion, squeeze
your honeysuckle girl.

In my mouth, a man
on a sad night. Drink & let my hand
only lead. Always
your two bodies revolve

for the world to wonder at.
Waving cigarette circles in the air
for the late crowd, nothing
& tendon. Everything.

Sawbuck 3.1 (greetings from the west coast)

so it's that special time of year again -- a new sawbuck is out! check it out:

{changming yuan} {donald dunbar} {francis raven} {hugh behm-steinberg} {jason fraley}
{jehanne dubrow} {kazim ali} {kimberly ann southwick} {sally van doren} {susan elbe}

link-o-rama

so i've spent most of the morning updating sawbuck's links page: added some, deleted some. take a look & let me know what's missing/defunct...

sacto has been mostly rainy the past week so i haven't had much of a chance to explore lately. d got back from portland late last night & as soon as she wakes up, we're getting breakfast @ mel's diner...which seems to be a west coast chain-type diner. it doesn't have the best reviews, but it's only 2 blocks away, so we'll see. besides, it's hard to eff up breakfast. mmm. i'm hungry. wake up soon, dena, wake up soon...

a hearty congratulations!

to sawbuck contributor Phillip Byron Oakes -- whose book Cactus Land is now available! buy it here.

also, for those of you paying attention, you may have picked up on the fact that i have recently embarked on a cross-country move...that's over now (though i'm still awaiting delivery of the rest of my stuff). what this means is that i'll now get back to reading sawbuck submissions! oh, & if anybody has any job leads in the sacramento area, i'd love to hear about them!

In two weeks...

i'll have a new mayor...

see ya later daley!

our world is a...

this explains a lot

**
and also: Go Al Sharpton!

how rad is this???

http://www.youtube.com/user/poetryanimations

Jim Henson, Psychopath?

or just over-caffeinated?

hmm...

denis leary reads bill knott???
(who, btw, has made ALL of his poetry available for free, here)

rediscovering charles dickens. pip's sister has just passed.

also, check out jonathan messinger's rave about kr in timeout chicago!! congrats kr!

at any given moment i'd rather be

so this is happening, rather more quickly than i thought possible...

hey i really love

this new poem by paul guest

POEM FOR THE TELEPHONE

Because I can’t imagine much more than
a continent’s worth of copper,

strand to strand, pole to pole,
supporting crows in the moment

before their brains spasm with
not thought but imperative

to flight, because I don’t know
why I see when I walk

knotted shoes hung
like dead things from

those suspensions of imagined
copper, because everything

beyond the toaster oven
glows with a magic

in my cloddish head,
I imagine our four a.m.

talk pulsing dark
to dark and back again,

and I am in love
with you, yes,

but also the world in which
love is translated

and carried and kept,
even meted out

in minutes, in cents per each
sweep of the clock

hand, I am
in love with this

world and this word
and the ones after it,

the ones said
in the night

when we are so close
no one could

say who spoke first
and who answered

if we slept,
if we spoke at all.


maybe he'll submit to sawbuck some day...sigh...wink...slight giggle...shit, gotta stir the spaghetti sauce

Wilco Encourages You To Vote

if you promise, you'll get a free song