off to the eastern ward.

oh well. there is the truth. I'm not sure if I should be telling the world this, but those who keep secrets, well in the end they come to nip them in the bottom. Let's just say that the story leaves me looking like a real hero if I cared to let you all in on the details on how I was committed, but really there are more important things to get to. In there I met wonderful people, I sang "amazing grace" acapella to a lady and afterwards she wept for a half hour (imagine how confused about what to do one would be when that happens?. It ended in me promising to sing it for her if her mother passed away soon. Which I thought an odd request but I am planning on complying if she gets in touch with me. I also drew a birthday card for a name named Sir Elgin who called me "slim" and was locked up in a containment cell for a whole night. The whole thing was needless to say, traumatizing, but I actually liked the people I met. I liked having conversations with them. Every single one had only interesting things to say, and when i left they all had only wonderful things to say to my father.

I've decided I am going to name my first book, third east. or three east. or i survived three east. I would maybe like to have a chapter of my chapbook named that. I'm going to name my chapbook Welcome to beautiful san ria. I've decided. I really do feel it represents the last summer. i mean it really fits.


well I needed to tell that story in order to get to the important part. When I was in there, a few of my friends came to visit me during the two hours that I had a day, and they would bring me books of poetry and novels and soduku so I had something to do. And last night I read this fantastic poetry book I found which is even edited by John Newlove. It's Dream Craters by Joe Rosenblatt. So I want to share a bit of this with you guys and some sylvia plath. [might as well be ironic and whip out the angsty female poets for the occasion.]

Dream Food

Remember me when I'm invisible
leaft & green inside a dream
where birds are snug in a nest
like a child's boots in a showbox.

I'll be a blue sky for uxorious spiders
weaving their highways in the light
to establish their thoughts in my space
of greening skin, & first-born of nuance.

Daffodils will laugh in the heart
of the dream, all ashimmer with pollen
from my unspoiled acreage of images
where birds hang out their signs: eggs wanted.

Roomer on Huron Street

He stretches out his days in a bathtub
coughing up a pond into a sponge, &
I suppose that squeezy animal is dead
for all the pores have let the body out.

The ghost pays eleven a week for his funeral suite,
radioactive with John's neon hung up daddy:
Iron Jesus smiling at a bouquet of plastic carnations.


Self Portrait

My image shrinks
in the mirror
behind the bar

a fugue is played
discordant voices ring
each one a part of me

all I've tried to be
is tosed down like a chaser.


Sunlight, Green Living Things...(for John Newlove)

There is a matronly sun in my sky
who noursishes the stunted leaves of her order
pronouncing green on their permutations
& igniting evenly the flowers hot in teir effusion.

The sharp light is a female luminosity
whose circumference is a burning cuisine
for the outer worlds, the shapes without centres
&I am a half-dazed nerve clinging on a small green island.

Speechless among the faces, the life lines
on whose surfaces the stems, leaves drink
the drop of my senses, I feel their absorption
into the pigment of listening green creatures.

The air warms up a fulgent insurrection
the plants cry, the roots nervously bleat
the buds grow around me, the desperate voices
sing home, & climb toward the dazzling Mother.



Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, warbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.


An Appearance

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.
Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!
I hear her great heart purr.

From her lips ampersands and percent signs
Exit like kisses.
It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.
What am I to make of these contradictions?
I wear white cuffs, I bow.

Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steele needle that flies so blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,

It will cover a dynasty.
How her body opens and shuts --
A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!

O heart, such disorganization!
The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.
ABC, her eyelids say.

someone hit a new low.
called me a junkie,
untrusworthy
and made me cry.

thats enough for me.
thank you, I wish miles well.

and well to him I have only one response. And I am not going to write this to him in an email to make him think that I even want to have a conversation with him ever again in his whole entire lifetime.

these are my last words to you, my dearest friend.

Love Poem for Faye
Joe Rosenblaat

Love is deep as a freshly killed bird
stroked by scimitars, measured by a whisker.
On everybody's doormat
there is a sleeping bird.

We want to forget
but still we feel the warmth. It hops on one leg
or hangs on a branch
with a broken wing.