Entropy

whenever I say things like
“poetry is a lethal weapon”

my friends get nervous

I can’t really blame them

they’ve visted me in
enough loony bins and dryouts
to know that

the line I walk between
image and fact

is sometimes thin indeed

I’ve fought my share of battles where
the only blood spilled
was inside my head…

Brecht said
he didn’t write his plays
to warm the cockles of the bourgeois heart

now he was bragging, but

what with freebase, croissants, all-talk radio and
credit card blow jobs

we’re already entertained to death…

and when I say things like
“poetry’s a war”

my friends look at me careful
and measure the whites of my eyes
against the blue of my nerves
and sigh

hopefully poised for ironic topspin

but ready to call my doctor
in the middle of the
night

I stare back at them blank-eyed

just because I’m crazy
doesn’t mean I
don’t make sense

if I sometimes tilt at windmills
head first

it’s probably because
I need a new head…

and when they ask why
I say how

when they ask how
I say when

and when I say when
they say

“But I have to go to the doctor
that week”

or, “I’m busy with my dogs”

or, “I’d rather eat Chinese”

or

it sounds good on paper
but what’s in it for me

Nothing, I reply

nothing at all

except a chance to drink fire from a glass
and spit it back in some asshole’s face

nothing but a license to
chase the Devil around the block
with a big blue sword
that is sharper than his horns

nothing I can run down in a heartbeat
or prove with math

but I cross my soul and
swear to kill

if I’m lying…

the world can eat itself alive
for another 1000 years
for all I care

I was never much good at
abstract compassion

I just want a moment of truth
so vast

that all the lights on the planet
dim for a second…

we’re right at ground zero
the times are suffused with murder
perfect with disbelief

and I say

take an emotion
and file it to a point
with everything you have and haven’t

shoot it through the laser
that beats in our bones

turn the sound up
way past 10
and don’t sweat the distortion…

and who knows

perhaps one day we’ll come to
a fine and deadly pleasure

one free breath.

by David Lerner

May there be an afterlife.

May you meet him there, the same age as you.
May the meeting take place in a small, locked room.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves tipped with razor-
      blades and acid.
May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands.
May the glass in his car window, which you smashed as he sat stopped
      at a red light, spike the rifle butt, and the concrete on which you’ll
            fall.

May the needles the doctors used to close his eye, stab your pupils
      every time you hit the wall and then the floor, which will be often.
May my father let you cower for a while, whimpering, “Please don’t
           shoot me. Please.”
May he laugh, unload your gun, toss it away;
Then may he take you with bare hands.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail
      and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw.
May his arms, which powered handstands and made their muscles jump
      to please me, wrap your head and grind your face like stone.
May his chest, thick and hairy as a bear’s, feel like a bear’s snapping
      your bones.
May his feet, which showed me the flutter kick and carried me miles
      through the woods, feel like axes crushing your one claim to man-
      hood as he chops you down.

And when you are down, and he’s done with you, which will be soon,
      since, even one-eyed, with brain damage, he’s a merciful man,
May the door to the room open and let him stride away to the Valhalla
      he deserves.
May you—bleeding, broken—drag yourself upright.

May you think the worst is over;
You’ve survived, and may still win.

Then may the door open once more, and let me in.

by Charles Harper Webb

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.


It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

by Rosemarie Urquico

“She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs – pansies and rosemary – and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook pasta and read poetry aloud.”

by Francesca Lia Block

1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

4. You hide, they seek.

5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

(via whorevidal)

Chapter minus two hundred and fifty
in which the author pays (and pays for it,
as always) a visit to one of the lost: I

dropped by the dark house with no furniture,
knocked, and was introduced to her mother,
a woman much younger than she was

and for obscure reasons known only to
no one had kept her from childhood on
locked in the oven, &c. At this time

they were living together or, hard to say,
dying, possibly from a mystery
condition which fuelled and quite vivified

their blunt if obsessively honed and
devotedly mutual hatred
and hissing contempt: classic case of

the weapon lying down with the wound?
From the first I had no problem picturing
(and would have preferred to eat decaying

fish and live, rained on, under a bridge)
what would happen if harm came to one of them,
should indeed anything this side of murder

slash suicide occur, although if that did
it was anyone’s guess which event would
come first. In a flash you could see it:
 
all hostilities concluded, and their own
miniature World War III’s aftermath,
and the all-out final progressive and

uninterrupted commercial-free
stone-cold muttering psychosis awaiting
lone survivor of this conflict, the end.

by Franz Wright

Inside my chest is a coalmine. you have the raddest 
eyes I’ve ever seen & you hair smells like rabbits. 
I want to call you on the telephone & tell you a secret 
about your shins. I wanna call you shakedown. I wanna 
call you shotgun. do you want to make a movie? 
I got this camera, see, & a backyard like forever, 
& when it snows it’s like the whole world is one
giant pickup line. my body in a wooden box
& you just like holes for breathing. if I’m lying 
my neck is a bird neck. the truth is skin & skin. 
your yellow dress. a stick of dynamite between my teeth.

by Nate Slawson

I know I promised you
I wouldn’t make a scene

in front of all your friends
but is it so wrong if I write

your name across my shoes
& sit by you at lunch

is it so wrong if I want
to stand next to you in gym

class O your legs remind me
of a river bed I would do

a hundred sit-ups for
you & whisper your name

& kiss my knees pretend-
ing they were you

      +++

do you remember the Halloween
I went dressed as a cello & you

were a postcard of the Chicago
skyline O that was the most

fantastic night you were all lit up
& I played the same three notes

for you over & over again
but now I’ve forgotten what

you said when I told you my heart
had been welded shut I think

you said something about
symmetry or else you laughed

& told me I should have
come dressed as a bullet wound

       +++

I wrote your name on all
my folders & drew your

silhouette like a bruise on the back
of my hand O you are an arrow

in my wistful heart you are a
radio that keeps me up each

night in bed but once upon
a time you were a girl with

wings & you let me trace the
fissures in your spine O why

can’t we go back to the time
when you were a cloverfield

& I was a meadowlark in the
engine of your delicate teeth

      +++

Miranda I said Miranda why
do you insist on calling me

by my name when I asked you
please to call me Ferdinand

to show me your teeth
& show me your fists

goddamnit there are still
some bones in my chest

you have yet to break
if you want you could use

my ribs for a cage in which
we both could live O if only

you’d draw a big black x & take
that fucking pickax & swing.

by Nate Slawson

I regard your affection, find your teeth have
left me a bruise necklace. The lipstick marks
    leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile.
    Your 40 ounces of malt beverage, your shrink
hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you
draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs
    when I’ve left the room, penned in your girl’s

look demented, misshapen approximations
of what I refuse to hand over. It’s a nice touch,
    though: a little love to accompany the cancer.
    My thought follows you to where you spend
your days lying in bed, smoking and reading
the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes
    circles you, rises like a moat after rainfall.

You are a study in detachment – the trigger eye
is your eye, still as a finger poised to press should
    one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder why you
    hate men so much when it seems you think like
one. Think of what I could be doing outside if
I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini,
    think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking

entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were
a number, I’d subtract you; if you were a sentence,
    I’d rewrite you. Are you the one who left these
    wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells
out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes?
If you are weather, then I’m a town, closing down
    at word of your coming: you’re a glacier on fast

forward, you’re direct as a detour, when I say
good-bye you move in next door. You say you
    want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car,
    and you’re too young to enter a bar. I should tether
you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke
your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar,
    walk you around the block, and show you off.

by Cate Marvin

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one’s singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One’s cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
have I except it comes from the sun?

by Wallace Stevens