Welcoming another guest blogger: Ryan Nowlin (lately of the Poetry Project). He will be joining me sometimes henceforth.

I don’t get Brooklyn My boss thought the catnip on my desk was pot.  Go figure! The reason why I like you  may stem from unresolved issues from jr. high school Atari was my personal hell.  See where this behavior gets you? Newark has the feeling of being affixed, but not New York City. Prudential Building is mostly underrated in New Jersey. Teens who hang out on street corners become bus drivers. Every stale breeze seemed to whisper “Louise” I have this recurrent dream of a starry carousel creaking After days of retrofitted murmurs soft hypnotic laughter approaching fresh fantasies a licked window. by Ryan Nowlin

Just under the 5 April wire: The really great thing is to go bananas

The really great thing is to go bananas

and get put in the attic for one of your transgressions--
a broken nail, say, or murder--and then begin the
tremendous game of pretending you're not
in the attic, even get a whole bunch of people
to strut by, make campy entrances, take sharp
exits, play like they're on the ground, play
you're also on the dirt, everyone on terra
firma, we're all test-touching it, tasting
sweet thick loamy in spring
when it's interrupted by roots
spreading worms digging life
and (hey) you like to write about it even
though you don't know that metal smell,
haven't whiffed it in years (ever?) but perched
(above) you keep on writing about it. Aw, poetry!

It begins. (Starry the curtain kicking)

disappeared

15 April

A person was paid to plant these pinks
not hoping but knowing how it happens
every year. Again. And again, so much
more remains buried and the dog snuffles madly and
whiffs, rooting. These first post-equinox weeks
I come to remind you
or to make you forget
there is another way
its path is petal-near
and it will cost you everything, or maybe nothing.

Back at it: April's fool

After Seeing Gerhard Richter Painting

Paintings are mortal enemies, says Richter

quoting Adorno, and poems too will kill you

if they roam unsupervised, untethered,

flying off along yon ecliptic with all they know,

know about you. Truth! Gad!

Maybe

it’s better to stop all this you mutter once

in a while, April nights when the thought squeezes

like a rat through a sliver in the baseboards

in the house built of words, always only words

so circumscribed, bound to 24 marks and

one antipodal Hippocratic oath: first, do harm –

that’s how you know it’s a word, a real word.

Another thing Richter says at movie’s end,

a line the director knew to save for last,

to remind us why we’d paid and offer

permission (the world loves to

hate its artists): It’s fun.

Justice Barbie

(27 late)

Justice Barbie!

Like tequila, one sip leads to if
I bump into old Malcolm X in the morning
when I’m supposed to be making a poem for Robin
and Charlie I’m all it’s the ballot or the bullet
for the rest of the day and meaning it, meaning
justice in a way that wouldn’t bother to say the word
though I might look up Chomsky on education
send a snippet to Evan and Eamon but no justice
probably trademarked by some honky designer
of disposable plastic manufactured in China.

There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

My pal John goes to China to make plastic gewgaws
and has to bring his own food and water.
Says it stinks real bad. Is that a related issue
and should it be explained in a poem.

“Justice Fine Cutlery in Primrose Pink”

If you and I were Americans there’d be no problem
my country ‘tis not of me, though as grandmother
pointed out when I began bringing home
this particular vintage, this is my America since
I can be mad as Malcolm X to which I explained
that’s because we’re crackers, gran, and surely none
of this politics has any place in poetry, maybe old
Tom Jefferson, he takes a seat in real poems
who read architecture books he'd ordered from Boston
so he could let more light and space in a house

oh Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.

Notions of self-evidence sadly hamstrung
for any gal who sipped postmodernism in the 80s or
even these ironic days when Bruce needs poetry,
or just light and space, at least truth spreading
easy like a lamp, easy like the April rainfall
which cannot help but corrode cars, graveyards, storm
of justice infinite like Greek's chaos and I think
We aren’t Americans yet and damn,
how will I ever make a poem.

11: It's Christopher Smart's Birthday

from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B

[For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]

....For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.