I just want to be your tugboat captain


blooming, with birds, by dronepop

The Poem That Changed America's Diapers
--by klipschutz

It was fitty years ago tonite
Sargent Shriver taught us wrong from right

No wonder de Tokeville came from France
to knock out a book of quotations

A frontier lot we were, a load in our collective pants
City Slickers got released & then the sequel

The rest is not quite history but you’re getting warm
Coast to coast we’re clean as hounds’ teeth in the rear

& spend more on toilet training cats
Than certain U.N. members do on condoms

Thanks to Our Way Of Life & Miramax & Jerry Wexler
But mostly thanks to "Bowel"

Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk at Dinner
-- by Elizabeth Alexander

When people smoked, and it hung over the table like magic or like wisps of the talk and the music between them,

chicken bones, the best Chateaux, Coca-Cola in glass, Monk’s eyes cut left, Ornette laughing at something off-camera,

safari suit and Savile Row bespoke, haberdashery circa ’72 and the black globe is damn near free.

Deep sounds in the cusp and shift, in the sour and the off-notes you bang and you blow, in the butter, the biscuits, the bird carcass,

jelly, just what you wanted and all you can eat.

Grotesque
-- by William Carlos Williams

The city has tits in rows.
The country is in the main--male,
It butts me with blunt stub-horns,
Forces me to oppose it
Or be trampled.

The city is full of milk
And lies still for the most part.
These crack skulls
And spill brains
Against her stomach.

Fifteen False Propositions Against God - Section XIII
-- by Jack Spicer

Hush now baby don't say a word
Mama's going to buy you a mocking bird
The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down
and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting
for an absent savior. The third
Joyful mystery.
If the mocking bird don't sing
Mama's going to buy you a diamond ring
The diamond ring is God, the mocking bird the Holy Ghost.
The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down
and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting
for an absent savior.