ANOTHER FEBRUARY PIPEDREAM Morning birdsong breaks sleep's heart & I am strangely not hungover. Dreamt I drowned in Rolling Rock. Now smiling safe ashore. No burning bowels. No seasick head. Just cloudy grateful peace. Coffee & this magic pipe. Some luck, a little grace.
PICTURES OF THE CRASH We were stunned we were staring & none of us tried to help. We were feeding on the moment. We were waiting on the next thing. When it all wrapped up too fast & balled together like god's fist. Our perfect lenses shattered! All this screaming in our heads! Now we're waitig at the curb pockets empty, story dead. So many broken parts & no one watching.
HOME Drunk in the backyard again: my neighbor's late tomatoes understand.
(Everything below was written in collusion with Ron Androla during a wet & smoky
weekend in Erie in late February.) BLANK & BROKEN i passed out first around midnight after investigating bass ale thru caramel-colored glass rather than bright green microscopic lense & foam * bart sat & smoked & drank & sang pissed & answered the phone & fondled the magical keyboard * while ron snored the cyberporn was lovely * i fell awake at 2 bart's wild eyes on electric flesh wild-faced drunk & perverted somewhere in korea * bottles pipes bags poems incense cigarettes chicken-bones * 2nd pot of coffee cooking dan bern cassette plays softening sunday morning, plus writing internet poems again thru waking red eyes * peace-pipes packed
ANDROLA PLAYS MIKE WALLACE ron: tell us all bart, what a poem is to you. bart: it's words breaking free of time. ron: you write a lot about drinking & smoking in yr poems. bart: i'm a high priest of the zen rastafarian drunkard order. i'm simply living out my faith. i'm very orthodox in my beliefs & practices. (much laughter) ron: how do you like this internet shit?do you find it useful to poets & evolutionary to poetry? bart: i like it & it's useful but merely temporary. it will soon be antiquated & gone the way of the manual typewriter. soon we will all have microchips surgically implanted in our brains & we will communicate telepathically. you'll be walking around with everybody's poems in yr head. ron: trying to put this in the present sense, & real rather than hallucinatory, if you might find a moment of sanity here, what are yr current feelings about putting our work on the world wide web like this. bart: what do you mean real? i'm hallucinating right now & so are you but i'll still attempt to answer yr imaginary question. i like the immediacy of the artist connecting with an audience. ron: so it adds a new dimension to the making of poems & stories. a new media we're able to participate in fairly easily. the question is whether amerika wants or even needs its underground writers visible. shld we prepare ourselves for eventual confrontation? bart: i don't think it changes anything about the making of poems & stories, just their distribution. i don't give a fuck about what amerika wants or needs. it's what i want & need. the rest will follow. there is always impending confrontation. ron: the universe is symbiotic. bart: huh? (much laughter again) ron: i think poetry in 1998 is at a high peak of future possibility. we must keep the sanitized from representing the art. bart: i think you're right that poetry seems to be very popular at the moment & that technology has contributed largely to this popularity. i encounter more young people who are into poetry these days. many of the teenagers i work with write & read poetry. they also draw & make music. maybe it's the connection between suffering & art. i think a lot of young people get a bad rap in amerikan society. my experience has been that they have a well-honed instinct for cutting thru bullshit. i think poetry has a lot to do with this. if i'm right not too many of these kids will fall under the spell of sanitized poetry. what's real will always find a home whether it's welcome or not.
APPETITE we hunt for words & flesh tho words are good flesh is better we are men behaving like men forced into a role by biology & society guns of cum shooting at the golden-holed moon her sweet face-orgasm bagged & carried home tender meat for pink stew raw & wet & us always hungry
