wake up, rod

I have trouble with nostalgia. But I also basically exist for it, at a certain level. I have problems with it. that last poem was about it too. I'm working through it. How do I write about it? dunno. you can take this as an assignment if you like. apologies for any roughness. Nostalgia #1 I’m looking at pictures of you while I pick my outerwear apart because I think about unlaced boots plowing through rural street snow, you pressed to my ear like a can with different kind of cord and I can’t get through without laughing at nobody in the middle of a field, praying service lasts for another moment, and you’re there, pressed against my ear, hundreds of miles of farmland compressed like an advent accordion; I dreamed of you going to get pancakes on Christmas morning on Christmas Eve, and stirring your coffee with your wrist angled that way, and the apparatus is on the verge of seizing – but still, trees and stockings, all yours - you sheared them from everything else, and even then t...

Horse, Horse, Packhorse On the yogurt farm we used my car’s roof as an ashtray and threw protein cubes at the sows. Vanilla. Horse, Horse, Packhorse. A connect-the-map-dots game with the letter S inscribes a pentagram on the world. The horses of privilege running Horse, Horse, Packhorse on every hill as far as I could see. Nostalgia is more than I can bear, each fucking second a x-shaped trail of scorched butterscotch slapped Horse, Horse, Packhorse on my heart, my actual heart, the muscle sizzling and putrefying in the sweetness. I want to stab a hole in the gas tank engine and play Horse, Horse, Packhorse, drive the car a mile away, let you drop the bic back at that random farm, slam on the accelerator until the flames catch up inside me, cooking Horse, Horse, Packhorse, thunder-clapping against the side of my face like fireworks. But I don’t, and this nostalgia eats everything. This resentment. Build it all up like a cairn of ci...

Our yard lays long as a dog run. Hearing thunder, we drag kitchen chairs close to the porch edge and work up a weed cloud to wait inside. The leaves cover wilting grass with crisps of color. A hook breaks on the radio like resurrection and we croon close, scaring off the Sunday swelling up around our city. Tuesday. You slunk in around 3, drunk, fumbling, city smelling up your wool. 10:28am and we were watching the North Tower close in on itself. On break from The Big Green, not yet working at Goldman. Before the Wall Street Bull broke you, we sat hand-in-hand, undercover, loving each other. The covers were weighty as steel. Too soon you were back in the city courting thin women who hung on you like tinsel, breaking bathroom doors with the butt of your hand. We phoned: Didn't you know...? And I didn't. Always the work, the show-time face. Never near enough to be close, Dave. Once Day Day doing The Loco-Motion, all closed fists and flung limbs to Grand Funk...

Hyperpop.2 by BenB * Hyperpop.2 Hellacious sweetmeat, son of a sinner, eye of some ungracious storm. Be my unilateral decision, my deciding electorate vote. Spindle sperm and faith, treble and arterial spray. Bless my wounds in nightshade neon, vending machine supplicant. I need this nearness, this all is intractable evidence ━ these sloppy sounds of sick on sick, wet sick, warbled over ice like disco butter ━ of Geppeto’s cunning strings. But I digress, pressed as I am against this filthy wall covered with pen marks, pleasure votive, the diacritical philosophies of a horny, hapless cellist. Cellophane pressed against my mouth, counting the molecules in the moisture. My lover means to kill me. My lover hasn’t succeeded yet, but love means letting him try. God is not good, god is good at. The distinction is my chapped knees, and grotesque hairdo, huffing bathroom paint and the plastic peony fresh of toilet bowl cleanser cakes. I know, I know, this part is where I am penet...

When we rise to say goodbye, he and I cleave drowsy, fall past one another. The rain pangs ruddy leaves. Uneasy fall. We were splayed, overlaid hot, in the Foothills when we fell asleep sloped. We woke at noon. I kissed him crazy, felt the fall. My fish sloshed reckless in her bowl. "Hold on tight!" Our Utah: The Rockies flexing their knuckles over a gold-queasy fall. Shoulders broad as doorframes and I am just passing through. I warned him I've had many loves; did he worry over the fall? We can't be alone in each other's open interval. Wreck morning on his chest. Lolling on breaths, it's easy to fall. My other has given me simplicity, the hush of home at dawn. I'll miss him when the winds bring the next balmy fall. You have consumed much joy in few years, wanting Katherine. Now learn about you and love: You fall in. That's the only fall.

Old Painter A forest is green, the night is black, water is blue. The bars and handles are silver, the seats ultimately orange like every train in this city. His hoodie is red, face darkened and imperceptible from this angle, just an opening in red. The floor is a greenish-gray, a color profile that likely went through hundreds of tests and applications before it was applied. The temperature is videogame-desert tan, some fixtures filtered in orange, some in yellow, some clear. This thing is purpling, rich, regal, brioche, buttermilk. REVERSE REVERSE. The night is Warp Records. The water is a grill reading “HATERS.” The trees are maximalist turtle shells sculpted by the Super Mario Brothers team in garnet and tanzanite moving at high speed under horses. The stars are an Auslese Riesling. The floor is a composite plastic made from fog and JC Penney’s catalogs. The temperature is Lacan. His hoodie is stunna shades made from melted down fragments of Elton John’s platforms, face a slice o...

Let me own a bit longer until I feel the stump of a pipe, an organ to mouth over, any segment will do, will fill until it no longer wants to fill. I aim to own your fingertip, your eyelash. This segment of our brief sleep until you take away your mouth and make a miserly smoked pipe. Far easier to tell under a pipe, a reason or consequence to fill. Kindly smoke my mouth, press to me like you own. Push against push until I can pull the segment of our magnet, segment my eye with a dip of a pipe or nick of a blade until I learn what it means to fill my own mouth. A quick mouth over, a talk segment we can pocket and own. Christ, pass the pipe I want nothing but fill to stuff me up until I don't know when's until. But that's fine, you have my mouth, I've got nothing to fill, nothing to leave but this segment this cause for wind pipe overhaul. To form my own fancy story. This is just cave to fill until I own the cling of your mouth, the undeniable segment, a sweet pipe-drea...

Cobblestones rattle beneath your feet like loose teeth. You stand helplessly, waiting for me, waiting to drive me to school. The best dreams are when I remember you are dead but I can work to hold you in the long corridor of my sleep, can cable the pines lining Gallivan Boulevard to my most upright of memories and make time still as a corpse. Jesus, don’t stand in the middle of the street, Dad. Cars are coming. Dad, don’t be a fool as I am now, waking upright, moaning, lilting embryonic in the sea of your absence. Two years, I tell my therapist. Now your body’s in a ten-inch box, a thimble cove you crawled into to languish years free of Mom’s incessant shuffling. She was driven to pile and repile magazines, to—helplessly?— motor her mouth and motor on: “Work sucks. Who does my boss think he’s fooling? The neighbors are snooping, and the goddam laundry pile’s blocking out the sun.” Remember, Daddy, when we cooked her Christmas ham for Chanukah dinner? You told us to hush up and hold...

revelation in electronica i. For this is the time of meat where sinews snap like well-placed hair bands for first days or nylons in the midst of espial.  Such are simple curtains chinked in bits of the body aluminum. Your wake is something I junk out for. Simple to yarn this out of vegetation, harder still with throat back, the bare bulbs of need rising, rising: a moan made lightly, elemental. ii. I heat pans like I heat men-- every stroke's a series of cross-eyed fabling. The feeling of getting dressed slowly with dark-made eyes, with dark-made tongues. Nacreous lacquer, I will slather you yet. I will rumble along these halls with a pitch of heat.  I will fall into electrocution, blow winds backhandedly, & nod the no. iii. The never-enough blush is on us tallied for and sewn into false pockets. If suddenly the grimace loosens wax will assume place-- I would offer to lick your muscle clean, frame your face for litany. Such simple knees to stand between: a fabric unwilling means...

Hi, So it's looking a little ragged around here, a little rough around the edges. In the interests of spiffing up the place, I'm going to post a poem about Kanye West. Is it really ready to be on the interwebs? Prob not, but I miss sharing. Stop, Drop, Ro, Bot (“Robocop” poems) 1. OK, OK, OK, IT AIN’T OK, OK, OK listen no yes yes no no no, listen like this like like this, like things are like things and some things are like gold goblets and some things are like megaman and other objects are like invisible white staircases trailing off into walls and other things are like an orchestra playing incidental music to me falling off a skyscraper sweating amethyst, but not all no no not at all nah nah that you know things are like this thing, but all things exist spinning like two Optimus Primes pirouetting on a bed of plums, and each string is just like a pit’s wrinkly sting nut-cutting my cheeks, like this no no like that, like how it happened before for you but it’s OK, O K, Oh-...

Hey Y'all. Above is an imaginary map. With subway stations. Make up some station names that you'd like to see. Don't name ones that have already been named. This is self-serving, but easy, and I'll tell you all what it's for soon.

This poem was written for the multi-part poem about doubt assignment.  Video of the Poet jerking off I. The moaning is misleading and The Cure is playing  too loudly    for my fumbling hands to concentrate on cumming.  II. The rubber bands  around my wrist ━ The sweat-slicked ass naked through sheer, wet powder blue briefs ━ The outline, the lifeline,  the throb insistent as a never-broken-heart ━     are all well and good     but for the skinny, nearly     naked boy stroking at the camera.  III. The big revealing torrent!     Milked straight      from the source! Arrives in dribbles, sighing spurts, disappointing liquid shudder. IV. 'Perhaps,' I tell myself, 'this is someone's idea of a good time'    while wiping away the falling action. 

That Forever Bag a baggie of advil, crushed and processed like tender buttons, a dozen teddy bear eyes dissolving like chalk in rain – damaged headphones, two left channels broken, mute dangly black doubled – blue zippers shark-teeth layered atop each other, bagtightening power: expandable things contract; reporter’s book grids spill over the bar, graphing the location of each whiskey droplet – sugary nodules particulate with detergent in the bottom of bags: no cleaning agent stays trapped in the bottle; “of course you end up becoming yourself” with a red metal pen and a meat receipt – crocodiles crawl on the case, but I didn’t pay that much for them – paper eggs on money books, registers in fullness, the sign of rain, of sleet, of snow nor hail glaring predatory from my backside: sleek, fleet.

Pocket Poem Write a poem based on the contents of your pocket or purse or bag or shoe or pouch or crack baggie or whatever you use to carry shit. No cheating. Meaning, don't add cool stuff to your pocket now in a frantic attempt to win this poem. If you do cheat, do it mercilessly.

Bendi - sorry if this is a little macabre / random / whatever. The Bendi's I found were really dissonant, and I ran with it. I love you wolf-brother. Three ways of looking at a Bendi i. Amateur Psychology After jerking off in the office bathroom and quickly taking two swigs of non-dairy creamer, Bendi sits at his cube, pulls out the DSM, and quietly diagnoses his co-workers. He wears his too small specs on the tip of his nose, is live- updating twitter mid-diagnosis to obtain a differential from the scientific community. His LinkedIn is immaculate, paced, diversified – a paragon of perfection, the Platonic form of professional networking. After work, at Applebee’s with Kathy and her rustic sweaters, he speaks grandly of her co-dependent behavior, gesticulating expansively with his iPhone. ii. “(Are all these alliterative B’s for real?)” “Delicately nuanced” is what they say about you, said about you, what they wrote on your tombstone, our plots facing each other. ...

The Dunning-Kruger Effect on Spinach i. I was going to make Spanikopita tonight. I’d just fuck it up. ii. I’ve made it before. Many times. The eggs, cheese, dill – My hands know the brush- iii. strokes required to cover each phyllo sheet and not leave spare butter. iv. But I wanted to impress you with my skills in the kitchen. I came v. to the conclusion that I have none. No one has told me my greek is vi. exemplary with- out my prompting. Popeye was like me, desperate for vii. compliments, trying to beef up for Olive Oyl. But he’d eat his can viii. of spinach, then no one could ignore his prowess. Grotesque with power, ix. like G-d, or what I imagine G-d to be like. Rabbi Akiva x. Called out to G-d in debates, to prove his rightness. I can call my mom, xi. but that’s a kind of shame that borders religious. Competence never xii. grasps its confidence. I mush eggs, cheese, dill, into the layers, bury it where not even G-d can find it.

hey rodders and voyeurs of rod: I usually don't do this, but I figured if I can't do it here, where can I? I've gotten published at two places that I find pretty groovy, and I'd like to share. I got published in PANK. PANK's pretty rad. And I got to do some weird little audio recordings, so that's exciting too. http://www.pankmagazine.com/?p=1627 Also, I was published in the first issue of WAC. The second issue's up, but the magazine is so bad-ass, you all should check it out. "Organ of Corti" is still messed up, but Gene got in contact with me and told me that it'll be fixed. Really cool mag from a super-passionate writer. http://www.wearechampionmag.com/ That's all, just wanted to be selfish for a sec. I will be double posting this weekend with poems, so yeah, see you then chickens.

RUB RUB Write a multi-part poem about doubt. That's all I'm going to say. Except I love each of you singularly and I miss [plug]. Fuck.

Jon created this tag when he found Alesia's ancient love poem on the internet randomly. I say we run with it. Write a poem concerned with (in any way) something you found while internet stalking another Rod member. Due date: (I'm not making one, you're not going to pay attention to it anyway. Neither am I.) Also, I'm thinking maybe we should do away with the assignment posting order. At best it seems that we do the assignments we want to do anyway and maybe if we have more assignments floating around there will be a larger pool of prompts. You could argue that... I'm rambling, or about to ramble. Long story short: Kate please feel free to post an assignment on top of this on. I love you all and you are in my hearts. -B.

Hi all- So that first poem was blah. And it continues to be blah. But in the spirit of Rod, I'm going to take the base elements of that poem and continue to change it, every night this week, and remix it (or revise, but yeah whatever it's a remix) for five days. I will actively agree with you that it's a naff poem and pretty undercooked and poorly sentimental. Let's see how I do, and if I can find something of worth. What I'm going to do is just edit this post with new versions of it, so that by Thursday there'll be original, remix 1, remix 2, remix 3, remix 4. I might remix the remixes. We'll see. So it'll appear in that order in the post. Once again, the genesis for this is this installation . If you're interested, please check back! *** Crumble It starts how all things start – sweet, structured, and stable. As time went on, more grease, more coagulant in your castle. I tried to stop the crackling, the popping, the humid dissolution. I to...

Daumenkino Sky a pinhole camera and she doesn’t know which side she’s on. Dirt in the blood of her nailbeds, something hard beneath her soles, she should be screaming. Milk curdles for less than this: a shutter, closing night. In the all-over grey she mouths: God, I know it’s not that you don’t love me. Ruthie . Somewhere, stars. Her hips curl in on themselves like doves waiting for morning. She thinks of black and whites of Auschwitz: This is how thin you can be and still be alive . The shutter’s opening, it’s day again, black and whites of Auschwitz : bodies in piles because feet pummeled heads to escape the gas rising from vents in the floor. A thumb of moon and the ceiling looks like floor again. Ruthie, which side are you on? She should be screaming but she has eyes of mud, mouthing: Please just shut it . Even she knows there is no language light enough to float her out of this hole. Shutter, little girl, shutter.

So all's quiet on the Rod front. So let's make a ruckus-like. This is a weird one, inspired by a conversation I had with Barbara Perez recently. I'd like for you all to write a poem about, inspired by, or in opposition to an art-film. Not arthouse film, but a video installation you've seen or has frustrated you. Video installation seems to occupy a very weird place in the gallery, the art world, cinema, and just about anywhere. I'm interested in where our four brains take it. I really don't care about any constraints outside of "art film / video installation." it doesn't need to be about it. it could just be a jump off point. it could be a structural gesture. don't care. but it's an interesting space to be sure. I'll leave it at that. let's call this assignment Installation. bonus points go to whoever charms me the most. I'm a cruel, flighty god.

So this piece is in response to the prior assignment on elision. It's part impenetrable and part painfully simple, and for that I apologize. It's where I'm at right now. I've been writing and editing a lot but not 'finishing' anything because I haven't yet pulled on all the right threads. I'm frustrated with me. Am I up for an assignment any time soon or have I been ousted? [she animates] like you, I am most invincible when most invisible but. she is the helium in my head, can’t put her back in the bag. a fickle incandescence always in need of feeding, she sells indestructible to porcelain to all the pretty little pageant queens. believe it. like you, I am a white woman but. she says, keep the candy  palmed, but the trick is meant to be imperfect, I’m looking at you. you can’t suck on fealty to fill a sugar tooth. she boils me until I shimmer with blindness, my rubber, my mongrel mother, shame. the adroit simplicity is she makes believe.

You told me to fuck on a cross a degenerative consecutive poem I. first time We painted it hot pink, draped emancipated underwear (a collection of contour pouches, lace, thick elastic waistbands and underwire), glitter-shellacked it to that motherfucker and dressed it up in pre-used memory foam from a seconds-mattress store. The cross, a sharp pink candy cane fucked with fluffernutter was what you fucked me on. Fucked me, because fucking is fucking both ways. A friend of mine likes to say “I want you inside me” when he’s inside them. A dick like a möbius strip, that’s what you give me, hard as physics, twisted like the tips of a handlebar mustache. Now is tense with sticky painted parts a memory away from blood. The Y-axis hangs over the edges of your smushed bed. We accomplish things in quadrants, bridging I-III, II-IV, the sparkly iridescence projecting Mandlebrot graphs onto our surfaces, sweat curving parabolas that exponentially rivulet down skin. Make polka do...

the rules are simple: write a three part poem. write the first part on a day and spend no more than 30 minutes on it. write the second part on the next day and spend no more than 20 minutes on it (no looking at the first part). write the third part in 10 minutes on the third day (no looking again). & that's that. Due 9 days from today.

so here it is: the terrible & the ugly. enjoy for twenty years nothing but needles i. hospital gown it's never quite as clean as television-- rolls of tape on the floor, the sound of rubber snap the sound of mistake, the sound of collapse but and now I've got the light on her now looking at wrinkles and her nakedness which comforts as if to say I've been there before and I'm going back. ii. electric paddles the pipe in the throat is the wrong sort of pipe but is there to do the breathing like that unnatural resurrection she twice performed on my goldfish. but now it is my turn to arrange the pellets, filter the water, breathe. iii. and I won't rifle through her purse till she's long and clean and dead. iv. transfusion the difference between iodine and blood is the belief that you aren't bleeding six needle pokes and four nurses and I'm still unconvinced we're made of the same stuff but here I have this finger and this nose that maps the differen...

I gave myself an assignment on top of an assignment. I asked my friend Joel if he had a psychic wishlist. I meant a list of material objects that he didn't have written down, but he took it to mean a list of abstractions that he wanted to embody. I immediately ganked the list and started writing a sequence of mini prose poem fragments around each one. Some of it is about him specifically, but those moments are diffused into a larger meditation on our insufficiencies as people to connect with abstractions and the insufficiencies of language that result from/cause this state. As for the omission portion of the poem. The actual abstraction that he wanted to introduce into his life are erased. Replaced in each case by the following symbol: [...] All in all it was weird and hard to write and probably not done yet. But here it is anyway. Cheers. -B. book of joel a list of want i. [...] no common ground, no quarter, no hope of surrender; in each clap of thunder is the name of god. ev...

this will likely be edited again sometime in the future. the story keeps expanding, even when I don't want it to. how I really feel about you we were on our way, halfway to fucking Santa Fe, Óðr in the back slurping beer from a beer helmet, mead from a mead cap, cigarette ashes hitting blacktop like finger cymbals. you were a gun made of beef jerky and uppers. a Buick full of errata, mise en scène, some said the objects were more interesting than the dialogue. later, alone in Arizona, adjusting the seat of your pants, the cell signal dropped out. hailstones, bidden from nowhere, fell on the sand. your adam’s apple, caught mid-word, stuck against the skin of your neck.