Exquisite Corpse Experiment (Alex & Patrycja)

Alex (Greenspan) and I created this after an epic waffle breakfast this morning. For those who aren't familiar with the poetry game, we each wrote a few lines and then folded over the paper so that we could only see the other person's last line. And Voila!:

Waiting for Waffles

This opus of a halfling: half-eaten half-life

core, shaped flower, shaped cunt

seeds patient, or dawdling. Decent? Darling

am I decent? Is it

crispy? Resentment flows

like pancake batter; feel it

between your toes and

that other soft space, roof of the mouth;

the underside of some steamed lid:

we’re cooking bow-tie pasta, darling,

sautéing anxieties on the side.

                        Sorry about the tattoos

            and the miniatures; the butter-

            knife wounds I never shared:

            can we still be friends?

Can we still sit--all dimples and clenched teeth

            and squirming toes?

            Watch for blueberries

underfoot; thorns and dragonflies;

love and reading-glasses.

We wish we could wait, unassuming,

the way a browning artichoke does

                        head chopped off,

head atop the slender neck

of a vase. Dead chess set. Herniated

            piano-fake eyelashes. The cranes

                        are drying. A poem is cooking.

                                    Let simmer until supple.

Creation Myth

in this beginning, some ambidextrous Lover is

plastering hand shadows like gumbo on a butt-naked wall,

and taking the tick-tock out of clocks.

this Paramour smoothes city-wrinkled foreheads

                                                       such poor puckered half-lives

to un-bottle a tempest;

paint harnessed, splattered onto

a starred canvas woven

by a Curiosity strung out

on open space and open-mouthed altitude.

            the kind of canvas that would stitch shut Time’s

            puppet lips if

            drunken banter didn’t so amuse

            this western Welkin.

no longer masked nor latticed, hard-hearts

give way to a tenderness like

pulp, a malleable Love with estrous hands

                                    reproducing some meaty minute, some

                                    lip-lock that dislodges the tempest;

                                    makes pollen.

pollen: a pulse, a blossom, a heat.

no longer such poor puckered things giggles (this, that, some) God. 

Seeking Syndrome

I've never been willing to believe that it takes time to do anything worth doing...

Why waste? They're always there, the whiles,

Bathed in one another, waiting.

Every one can be won, and not one is worth

but the worth of another.

Beyond the belief that hard work and sacrifice will get me what I want...

I can see it now, dear. The baubles. The trinkets,

The ornamental sludge and the really, really cool thing!

I wish I could show you that

Hard work and sacrifice will get you... Hard work and sacrifice.

If I can't have it now I don't want it...

If I can just taste it on the tip of my, tip of my top,

Then I'll know that I didn't get it, and forget it.

To all others, those things that are not yet here,

To me, all that I find, exactly where I am.

Here it is, the thing I've been waiting for!...

Built before I noticed, an astronomical phenomenon.

A carefully constructed coincidence,

Clearly the creation of a Creator...

Clearly!

Like a day, it's so plain! Plain as day...

So plain that some kids come and paint-spray it away.

here is something that I just wrote. It's one poem but it feels like two different poems but I want it to be one poem. Help.

Kids are so weird.

Today I watched one fill his fists with gravel

and then open them over the sidewalk.

The gravel went everywhere except the designated gravel-place.

That was at the park.

There were a lot of weird kids there with their normal parents.

Given what we all suspect to be true about heritability,

it's a wonder parents take their kids anywhere.

My hands and forearms were cold, but it

was nice to read in the sun anyway.

I only got interrupted by an errant frisbee once.

Now I'm writing this in my warm car in the parking lot.

It's a sort of halfway house for the reluctant park-leaver.

Here is a work-in-progress

To be is to metaphor, I believe

(Inspired by a list of words, selected at random, from George Oppen's “Of Being Numerous”)

in nothing. Irony shows us ancestry built the vehicle tomorrow. A child can preface this, but morality has dropped. What is this, seated caves? Less. Poor unknown: me, he. What, in a moment, incredibly rasps into unlikely plant grass poetry: artists sail poems. The single source of memoriam, the artist, the theater of william. These literatures are foxholes. Then the artist, what? In memoriam of all materials: all the poems yield excitement from their sources within artists. Incomplete occurrences between speech, never power never exalted, speak on numerous apprenticeships. e.g. “The monument smiled at the pedestrian by night.” Solution? Structure; branches. Comes glass, constructs preface, admits acknowledgements on the matter dear oppen dear niedecker dear matter. A child can outlast language and all its sea. Poems are almost primitive and I doubt the miraculous can be. The sea is dark, the cabins and their planets soar about us, we; animalia. A girl might say the symbol means sign, the light might show there are numerous subways, only few white women. The savvy, plain infantry bulks in halls, ready to undertake the night in relief of a solution, a reconstruction of idiom. As the ladies at parties would sorrow in their discrete notes and pillow books, true artists wool their tongues but in a good boy fashion, all that which they know. However, enlightened by longitude the crowd thus pounds on starlit, killing definition; and I? undoing. It is a neoclassic scene paved by one argument: The infantry stormed the hull, and beauty was felt by all.

First foray into interweb publication

Hi everyone. Here goes nothing:

Howard.

It’s an honor to be here with you, Alex.

No, Alex, the honor
is all mine. It’s something
ingestible: something I’ll keep
until the next piss.

Would you mind telling us a little about yourself?

Yes.

How is it you came to be drunk, slumped
over your own doorstep, talking to yourself?

It all started with
Chopin. I find
if I press my face
hard enough
into the venetian blinds,
maybe he’ll go away.

And the others?

It’s hard to have friends
when you wear a different
head for each of them. You
have to do more laundry that way.
Heads should be good for more than one wear
like pants.

So, how do you do it?

I’ve managed to assemble
a working self from the rummage.
Managed to glue
the face together,
to make out the smile
of someone who thinks they know you.

But would you ever really want to be friends with someone who speaks the way poems are written?

Hark, the crumbling leaf
stapled to the wall, glowing
embers of gemstone dragonfly
table lamps, the artichoke
in a vase, pastel
pictures of me groping
for my own back.

Now you’re just listing things in your bedroom.

Depends, whose poetry
are we talking. I’d never
kiss someone who writes
poems like mine.

How is it you write so haphazardly?

As with clouds you
have to be on a first name basis
with your poems.
This poem goes by his middle name.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it

Welcome hoodlums, wanderers, paragons, Svengalis, and hoi polloi! 


I've talked to some of y'all about workshopping outside of our overly elephantine class. My idea for this blog is to use it as a forum for sharing our work & giving constructive feedback; in addition, it can serve as a impulse colloquy (I'd love to see posts with words/ ideas/ poems that inspire your work, whether avant-garde or orthodox).. 

If we decide to step out of the cyber realm, I see wine & scribbling in the near future of this collective ;-) Who knows, maybe a chapbook could come out of this. Whatever happens, all I ask for is a propinquity to poetics and a desire to include this blog in your stockpile of procrastination gambits. 

And please, don't hold back on feedback!


Jibber-jabberedly yours,
Patrycja