pith…

The soap opera organ announces
what we can hardly bear to hear.
A metal-aproned matron
summons the skin ribbon
she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500,
circa 1969. Her tremolo
is a casual torture. We mistake
her voice for a choir of a thousand
muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in
to an Easter dinner of wood duck
and greens. There are no roses
around our scarred 3D hearts
or arranged in the centerpiece
that absorbs what words we can pick
from our teeth. We are weary, heavy
weary, of managed creation and sick
from songs that tempt us simply
to silence. We scrape cold beards
of frost with manicured nails,
screeching at the April windows.
Our fathers were fools to store
their small-grained harvests
in such broad-slatted barns.
We watch the mess heap up
with the snow and the hyphens.
Nobody clears the faux-oak table
but the talkative furniture
does our screaming for us
and a phatic nation learns to curse
in shrunken frontier tongues.

.

joesmith

.

© joesmith, from “The Way the Worlds Comes In,” an upcoming volume of collected poems.

I save the spaces.
No, I’m no bent surveyor
with a three-legged stare
bent on destiny, unsettled
by innominate expanses,
undone by an absence
of fences, parsing the plenty.
We know how that was
manifest. I’ve never been
enamoured of wrought
geometries and plaid
is a bad parody of place.
I save only the spaces:

triangulate spans between
the bridge trusses where
swallows play no-touch tag,
the cracks under windows
where the wind wriggles in,
those gaps around the sink
where prehistoric beetles
pass like Hermes from world
to world, lulls in a song
where notes go to compose
themselves, the fissures
in a hammerhead stamped
out from tempered metal.

I make a man inhabit
the middle of this room
and wait to arrange nothing
but occasions to empty.
When he’s finished shaping
a proper container, we carry
slim air where it’s needed:
for earthquakes or murders,
to bend the paths of bullets,
to reverse the sad collapse
of width. Yes, I guess
I have to catch him first.
A space is a saving.

.

- joesmith
© 2010

When the planets turned ready
in slow-time abeyance for a rendition
of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man
or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade,
or would-be farmer plunging his hands in
black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system,
or maybe highland warrior who puts his
tired head to his suffering wife’s breast
assembled on this day, this ejection of red
and flesh, the gasp of Baby Boy Smith
for there was no other name.

Now there is the dark before the dawn
that brings the chirping of birds like those
within an ivy-covered wall of a university
building where we walked and my
umbrella snapped back continuously
in the strong wind like an animal trap
with sex and not death in its maw,
so on this morning the birds wake
for hours before the light and peep
out a missive for you today:
Look in your house, the nineteen year
old punk did not die. See all that
you have made, all the people of your mind,
all your broken, and all your gentle
are housed inside.

.

Jenny Benjamin-Smith, April 3 2010

Strip malls give way to strip clubs
One hundred fifty miles grind
Alongside mammoth motor homes

The land is changing
She is more voluptuous
Her sins secreted

While in dusty towns
Proud old resentments
Bolted to bricks shout

“Get us out of the United Nations!”

Greasy truck-stop trading posts
Stand between bands of green
Separating coming and going—

Out on the highway
Blue semi driver plays your game
Trading slots and making up stories

Regarding stiff-armed drivers from Illinois

-   Kathleen Eull

I

Here in the town of the common and the good,
only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder
rumble, no sound to savor, no low music
to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first
it’s the din, carried air away east, then rain
broken in waves on main street curbs
where urges are nearly two blocks long.

Homines urbis mundi,
park in the lines diagonally.
Turn right or left one-way
at the pagoda that would be green.

At the Pix they’ re playing last year’s winner
of something like a fig leaf, somewhere in France.
A yo-yo in the hand of the boy on the bike
who ups and downs for most the day, metal playing
in his head and a knack, at ten, for squaring
every stimulus. Not much to do for the dudes
at Dave’s Music. They swap names of shared lays,
grow their hair pretty long and each one knows
where the other one lives.

Before the show, tattoos for all.
The low whir of the master
inking permanence to your arm.
We need this town
like you need that tattoo,
a black widow you designed yourself
for Bill the Renaissance Needle to etch.
An artist, says the ‘Nam vet
with the vulture on his knee.

II

A caudal of the flocked
hum hymnals to the wind,
grace notes for toothless grinding,
communal gurgles for the state.
We barter our hearts like borrowed garments
and run to each other as slow-mo lovers
in a misfed reshoot of a colorized film.

The town’s name came from their language,
not the painted faces, not the pox, nor
the slaughter, never the whooping fans of earth.

We must please the unseen
keepers of grids that plot
our soddled odds and finagled
every street. We watch parabolas
fall up across the sky, a tired arc
as rising star, as arbitrary schism
between ground and zero aim.
We’re gods, goddammit, less
their distant entertainments.

- joesmith

.

Copyright, joesmith. Please.

“It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed.” – Søren Kierkegarrd

The wind is against me
on my pedaled way to work.
A bus almost clips me
cutting in to its shelter at the curb.
A Benz would prefer to run the light
and me over to waiting one second more.
The finger inside shows off its white
length behind smoked sloped glass. Every car
would rather rattle my irksome bones
across the avenue (like bar dice slammed out
of their leatherette cup) than notice
I’m next to naked without their metal
to enfold me. I am only sure
that winter will be worse and that words
meant to comfort are drab impostures.

The wind again is against me
all the chilled way home. A horn
reminds me how much I need
a light to flash my presence. (More
would, of course, be better, but the bushes
here, if they burn at all, burn away to ashes.)
But I remember you said you had a “crush”
on me and I begin to wonder in spite
of the wind and the traffic and the cynic
on my bike how old is too old to feel like
a first-kissed kid getting red in public.
I can’t help but think this
Spring might arrive a week or so early
or listen when you tell me “It’s o.k. It’s O
K.” I can even believe you mean each letter.

.

joesmith

Alert as the light that changes color
with the weather atop the building
some mistake as electric, we’re mingling
our blood and juices without the dolor
that ought accompany a great big age
of disease. We are lovely here and welcome
the change we bring to each brown room.
In the phone booth, we tear our pages
from the musclebound book, feeding each
to the other our spare and crinkled names.
Ecstasy is this and we, we are sudden
and hairy on the fair political body.
We’re slick in the acidic rain, slippery
as a morning mood. We bite and wrestle
like wiry otters, loving mud and burning
wet without a stick of weathered wood.

.

joesmith

BURIEDFED

This is my last song about myself, about my friends
Found something else to sing
Try and patch it up with tape and twine
Maybe I’ll just break everything that’s mine

They wheeled out my casket,
They said, “Boy, lay down your head”
I said, “Aw shit, man, I ain’t even dead”
I won’t be buried for I’m…

My friend, who’s a real yo-yo
She’s always crying, and no one knows why
She’s gonna be alright
Lost her past in a fuzzy fire
Wasn’t even drunk, just a little tired last night

And they took her to the doctor
To fix her heart, and heal her head
She said, “Goddamn, I’m tired of being polite
Go save somebody else”

Friend of mine drank something fine,
Choked to death before his time, last night
He said, “I found that thing you really need”
Come on, you can’t breathe alright

Everyone’ll be there at the burial in your head
And a tear or two, they shed
Then they’re gonna go digging in your hole
And find someone else instead
Make someone else feel dead instead

Oh, he didn’t like people much at all
Tasted better with alcohol
You know how that one goes
He realized he’d missed his whole life
Kissed his dog and shot his wife last night

And they pulled him to a preacher
He said, “Pray ‘Our Father’ prayers”
He said, “Aw shit, man, I don’t even care
Oh, I ain’t did nothing”

Reckless ruin is killing high
A great, fine victory we’re still alive
My, my, what a surprise
I got home late, I don’t care
Better late than never, dear

They took her to the prison
Sat across from him, and sighed
She said, “Fuck you, I wanted just to die
How come you, baby boy, you
You can’t do a damn thing right
You can’t do any damn thing right”

This is my last song I write inside
Going out, find somewhere else to hide
Late at night on an empty street
Ain’t anyone I know walking beside me

I ain’t done a damn thing right
But oh, I’ll try, before I die
How ’bout tonight

They wheeled out my casket,
They said, “Boy, lay down your head”
I said, “Believe me, I wish that I was dead”
But as long as I’ve been running
While this world exploded in this big hole in my head

But as long as I’ve been running
Well, I might just keep it coming
To someone else instead

Oh, you, baby boy, you
You can’t do a damn thing right
You can’t do any damn thing right

.

- Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, “Buriedfed” from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, 2008 debut album.

BEFORE THE GAME

Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are cuckoo’s eggs

Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump jump high high
On top of yourself

Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss
Who doesn’t break into pieces
Who remains whole who gets up whole
Plays

.

Vasko Popa, translated by Charles Simic. From Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems, Oberlin College Press; Revised and Expanded Ed edition (December 1987).

When I’m done, love, when
the impalpable me has made his sullen exit,
scrape clean the meat from my bones. String it
in ribbons in the back yard trees. Wait
for morning rain and hear the glorified pigeons
attempt to sing. Summon then the odiferous
ones, the shunned ones, the old utilarians
who speak to no one, but whose sense
of dread and laughter and occassion
are legendary, who are wise to abhor
what rots in vain and dirty remembrance.
Then turn and hum a tune of your invention.
Ignore the slight song at your back
and follow your salted path home.
Rend there my considerable fat.
Sow it along the mud-slicked riverbank
for the wading birds to pick at and increase
their wanting knees. Arrange the bones
in an open field in the shapes of some ruined
ancient alphabet. Change the readings
to the cycles of your joyous body. They may
amuse the high birds of prey, confuse
the headings of curious pilots or commune
with an alien moon. Reserve a single
fibula for sharpening the knives with which
you dice our daughters’ green meals.
Just make use of me, somehow. Please.

Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two after my feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of pre-owned tree.

I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.

I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no burning
bush to mask my fiery parts, a shmegege
with a headache and a holey bag of rocks. I’m all
you’ve forgotten and never did like the music you make me.

Eloi Eloi
what the lama sabachthani?
Why the mystery? No mystery really
about a cuckold for a Dad with a whole god
against him and Mom nailed clearly by a conspiracy of stars

and moving
always moving
from sung insult to sung
insult, from chicken yard to chicken yard.
Wherever we were, chickens and sand. I might as well be yellow

in Belgium
with dry-eyed nuns
staring down my bloodless toes
while a farmer stalks their sisters. Know only
that I loved the feel of a breeze up my rough muslin skirt,

that the kingdom
is begotten within a sodden
you, that the sky is what won’t listen,
that my lot is but this single miracle to darken
what won’t face me. Did it. Not bad. No visions. It is finished.

.

© joesmith, 2007

Tonight smells like April
Awake and coming hard against
March spaces—
Forward insistence falling
Upon those wakeful and reaching,
Touching the way to intersect
Before and Not Yet;
Navigating unseen language
Barefoot, yes!
Normal people stand in slippers
To drink a glass of warm milk—
Eat their days in tiny slices.

- Kathleen Eull

Half-full of someone like a mother
or her lover unbuttoned in dad’s
traveling robe, turned around
in an instant, to the strained grace
of pointed cameras. A kleptomaniac
of attention, eyes pinched in to lit
aluminum, hoarding the latest loss
of memory in a cipher nation of nervous
oblivion, entertaining what remains
of the children. Bozo is staring at his
shoes again, doing his damnedest
to pronounce gratuitous, scratching
lotto tickets at the high white counter,
slurping the last from his super monster
size cup, wondering where he can go
to cash in his principle and who made
off with his only Sunday suit. Conception
was a talk show. Celebrities appeared
from the workshirts behind the louvers
in accordian closet doors. He knows
he’s responsible for his bad reception.
He wants to edit his inheritance, stuff
his finger up an aperture, sleep through
the whole morning. No, make that afternoon.

A man with a backbone
is dangerously exposed.

This explains a shortage.

I can divine these brambles.
Or these gnarled flowers at my feet.
They obscure my heels as I
float on yellow horizons.
Tip the diagonal of my arms into
the numbers of years set down like dust.
I can, you see, lead you somewhere,
over rock and highland green.
I can conjure stone from earth
to make a window to another world.
Come with me. Take the tips of my fingers.
Interlace the leaves and set down
your sword, your wand.
You have no need for all the people
who make up your mind.
You have no need for the lily or rose
jabbing between your legs like a crude
lover. Walk this way with me,
and I will tip the stars down your throat.
Drop the grapes and roll them over the skin
of your neck. Only then will you have
the idea of splendor. Of the eternal.
All you need is this staff to guide your way.
All you need is to follow the shift
of my eyes. I may lead you somewhere,
or you could go the other way.
Sit down at my table. I’ll flip forever
like a figure eight. I’ll let you look
at me for as long as it takes.
Let’s begin. I promise. This is something
you won’t forget.

- Jenny Benjamin-Smith

the reverberation of the garage door opening tickles me from below,
i can’t wait for you to come back up after your morning smoke.

i miss your warm breath against my shoulders, your arms around me,
the tip of your toes protruding from the blanket’s warmth
on an anonymous wisconsin morning – is it sunny, raining, snowing?

i hear you downstairs: checking your e-mail, eating cereal.
i know what your doing – routine runs our lives.

i hear you upstairs now: changing into your clothes,

you knock on the door: “honey, you still in the bathroom? its been ten minutes.”
i answer, “i’ll be right out, after i finish this line.”

SUNDAY SERMON I

In these godless days of the year 2009, of which a quarter has already been gnawed away by the dredging samsara of day to day, week to week workhorse life and the lust for lifelessness swimming through glass after glass of liquid anesthetic and the drone of satiating conversation and howling guitars while The Blues seeps from morning pores like single-malt perfume and the leaden weight of another handful of crumpled beer cans and dollar bills in my back pocket keeps me holed up in the attic of my own reeling mind.

The Ides of March has slithered by with no trace and ill Irish luck only brings out the wrong kind of green-eyed girls who drink black beer and drool long winded lines of nothingness instead of telling fortunes and reading weathered palm lines with needled gypsy fingers the color of molasses.

Restless Sunday afternoon haze in my church where Jesus’ blood is oily haloed black coffee and his body burns down to a filter with a camel stamped on it, ah’ men. 

John Dick

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

Oh didn’t we dance a puzzle
Round the tree when we
Danced the way we did
In early April when all is
Vernal and we needed twigs to
Invoke the gods that hovered
Near a healthy sprig
About a foot or so longer
Than needed to produce an
Invocation that requires wood
Or a cross of sticks so brittle
Not sought by dancing
Under the tree that provides
Sustenance and spirits
In a silly game of faith.
Now and always— once we
Got the air’s great laxity under us
Wending through branches bending
Over the dancing bodies spending
Our every energy in timeless total.
Didn’t our puzzle work up an ire
Among the weather’s eager attitudes
Never touched with darkness until
Danger marked the divination?
Till then it was a merriment we cut
Round each and every arbor
Every single dripping digit in
Each tortured orchard we could find
Behind our distant history—
Recollected behind a roaring, rapid—
Naked, blatant blanket of mistakes
Not ever recognized by teller or by told.
Consider the story supple gold—
However unbelievable, however ill-begot—
Each mystery is a gloried hardship, each
Song a found invention, hard to teach.

Once upon a time there was an error
So ridiculous so minute
No one could have paid attention to it

It couldn’t stand
To see or hear itself

It made up all sorts of nonsense
Just to prove
That it really didn’t exist

It imagined a space
To fit all its proofs in
And time to guard its proofs
And the world to witness them

All that it imagined
Was not so ridiculous
Or so minute
But was of course in error

Was anything else possible

“Proud Error” from Homage to the Lame Wolf by Vasko Popa, translated by Charles Simic, 1987, Oberlin College Press. Copyright © 1987, Oberlin College Press.

Buy this great book:
Vasko Popa, Homage to the Lame Wolf, trans. Charles Simic