Skid

Gaga Gala

Gaga Gala At the Institute of Haiku-Induced Orgasm, the reading was nearly over before it began. In Iowa City, when my friend read his poem about styling his dead mother’s wig, it was like he was the only member of our tribe with a heart that still worked. I wonder, Does anyone hear the Hare Krishnas outside passing near? At the Center for Useless Experimentation, my poem about sick swans went over big although no one caught that it was really about Keats’s tuberculosis. After five minutes in the Writers’ Gaggle to benefit a citywide neutering by the ASPCA, the woman who read about her genitals handcuffed to the Washington Monument asked if I could believe there was nothing to drink. Nope, but everyone knows at least one story of Dylan Thomas hitting the orchestra pit and Dionysus throwing up all over his blue tunic. The lamb on his shoulder doesn’t have a head. Dirty dirty dirty, intones Cotton Mather into the microphone. Sylvia Plath: head of a Roman emperor, lips of Tinker Bell. The lamb on her shoulder doesn’t have a head. Antonin Artaud, 16 not someone you’d expect in charge but here he is, in charge: zzzzpktzzzzzzzzzzzpktzzzpktpkttt as if the forces of the cosmos are still threshing out the human soul. Chainsaw rackmold tungsten noose. Okay, I’m convinced but something still seems missing. The white answer never fits the white question. In New York, at the Council for Public Poetry Safety, the great-eared, glassy-winged elder says he remembers me from Arizona although I’ve never been to Arizona. Ah, Arizona, I try to convey into his bushy eyeholes, buggy narcotic vulvaular windswept idyllic screwed-up Arizona, since then I’ve not been the same. The winter morning is a stone written upon by evaporation. The summer evening a sheet on which a thousand poets try to sleep. One reads for an hour about the brain surgery of her horse, another weeps, cluing in the audience, and a coat falls away from the other coats as if with great effort. In the case of helium, first they knew it was there then they found it. With the electron, first they found it then it proved not to be there. 17 ...