learn the lesson he said nobody cares
he said it looking in the mirror
like I was was supposed to say no
when I had me at yes.

there’s no point to this rant except to express about poetry. the book isn’t poetry, and i haven’t seen the film. i don’t want to see it.

expressive image making in prose doesn’t make a poetic prose. it makes a decorated prose. necessarily, since prose at heart is only a listing of facts. facts are useful things, but they don’t exist outside of their fact container. perhaps in a bleak prose, like bukowsky’s supposed poetry… maybe there a little bit of color might have an impact on the dull reader… take him by surprise: ‘this is poetry’.

the book is crap as lit. what is lit? probably, it’s the juxtaposition of the author’s private life experience and the reader’s reading experience. glued of course with the author’s reading and writing experience into a multi-sensual fiberboard of life-like dialoging — i mean explicitly, ‘the creation of a special language’ to talk story. maybe in henry james, where james is concerned with character and not just with appearing to, and talking of, play the rules of the game, of high society’s game. i mean, james critiqued the social order. call me by your name just gossips about it. imagine le grand meulnes merged with a la recherche, but then reduced to a ginsberg ‘gay’ gossip about who was fucking whom?

but, we’re about learning. i learned from the book. it allowed me to accept that there are narcissist fucks in the world who are amoral and are very attractive to little emos like me… oversensitive boys like me, who need moral authority. the book also allowed me to admit that not every sensitive boy who likes other boys is more than just another guy looking for flesh. i mean, i’m queer because i’m creative, not the other way around. i’d be queer for the older boy because i wanted to find out his truth and its source, and what it actually meant in the world: is strong all that it’s about? is having someone strong love me my actuality as human? the gay lobby seems to be saying that someone loving them is their biological actuality. i don’t agree. being highly creative means you’re perceptive in and on several sense realms at once. touch has the least sense content. touch offers immediate body consciousness — body’s thought. probably, it’s more that my queer is that i’m queer for music, in the way we’d be alternatively called ‘musical’ instead of queer or faggot. maybe we just liked the term because it was easier to create with than the dismissive ‘invert’. ‘invert’ gets kind of personal. nobody in call me is invert. in fact, nothing’s really personal in the novel. the boy-boy is a collection of memories and the man-boy is a dildo created for the boy-boy. nobody really talks in the book. people explain, but that’s because the dialog and plots are lifted from any literature the author might quote so that a new yorker critic might twitch. the dialog has to explain why the lit references aren’t references at all, but ‘authentic experience talked of in literary dialect.’ the kid’s background, the books he’s supposed to have read. the interesting people who’ve stayed at the house, talking and acting in literary. being a poet, i have to assume that the book is a picture of the author writing the book. there are too many style shoots in this book for me. it’s distracting. does the boy need to become someone or not? ‘becoming someone’ isn’t really on the table anymore. ‘becoming satisfied’ is how it happens now. even the dialog of overcoming your father’s authority isn’t even… the man-boy becomes father, normal and necessary for the boy’s psychology, no? yet the father in this isn’t really told as a weak and worthless father. why would the boy need an idealized father? because of the man-boy’s physical authority? that’s not played out in the book. because the man-bot is a cosmic twin? the completion of the boy-bot’s doubts into action? — terry’s foster brother teaches him not to be afraid of horses?  monterlant? not here, not in the finzi-contini’s garden.

i’m ranting. i don’t know how to call you by your name. but, the book is successful for me because it’s a dumpster of  partial ideas in their primal state — not yet glued into action figures. the ‘gay’ thing. well, gay is pretty much just narcissistic — i mean, the gay of  appearance. the book isn’t queer. ‘naked lunch’ is queer — it never allows itself to call anything by any name to only fetch it. to fetch sex or money, or bud-lite in a gay bar. i’m a high-functioning retard — i sort of, i’ll say, have a woman and man’s brain functions at once. neurologically, i’m crossed over side to side and front to back. i see a lot and hear a lot, and i can do a lot with what i receive. and, nothing is settled for me except provisionally. for me, the book i’d want would be, ‘show me what’s your name’ and nobody’d read it.

thanks charyl.leverette. she was able to start a dialog on ‘genius and creative’ and the ‘creative genius’ in poetry circle. this is good. we have to ask ourselves how we know the concepts and humiliate ourselves in thinking how we’ve had to defend ourselves from linears by calling ourselves ‘genius’.

in my world, ‘creative’ and ‘genius’ are icons. icons are a button pushed to go to another level or another place. ‘level’ is a place, but not all places exist on another level from the discourse you’re pythoning.

“creative” is to do something unexpected with material no one values beyond its material worth. here, ‘creative’ and ‘genius’ are the same concept. ‘you’re a genius!’… ‘you’re very creative!’. context.

moving  over to the people talking in the corner, understanding the ‘material’ itself is a thing in itself. you step into the shoes of the canvas or the curtain. you become the soul of the material. that’s special. that’s synesthetic… that’s tasting the texture and hearing the color. which means that enough sense data has been returned from the object that you can make a story of it. you not only know the quilt is laying on the old bed, you feel the wood of the bed reacting to the quilt’s wool and imagine the old woman remembering. the old woman who’s always at the back of your mind and who isn’t your mother… who’s the avatar of dissolution. you make an intimacy with an event in the world, and you can use that intimacy to tell an unusual and effective story. that’s the intuitive of ‘genius’.

but, you’ve got to present, and how that’s done is also a creative. images aside, suppose you want to tell a joke but you’re not sure of the audience… your experience would tell you to not show off, to slow down the delivery and make each word and gesture count as a sense experience in itself. like writing a poem, no? you create the listeners into an ordered experience for you as you speak. you’re intuitive, and you know that if the joke isn’t also discovered by you as you say it, that it’s not a working joke. children’s creativity is like this — they know how to act like grownups when it counts. they can’t invent the idea of making words musical, but they can invent a clever song.

for genius, nothing is working. you accept the subjective because the intuition is your soul and energy — it’s what you have to form the world as livable. you have a good memory — all geniuses have some kind of memory that stores experience and can be referenced when needed — when there’s a creative blank in creative space that needs to be patched with a concept and sound and image. you have a good memory, and you’ve studied hard, you’ve killed yourself trying to understand what’s supposed to be good and what’s obviously only a successful fad and called ‘art’ or ‘science’. you’ve absorbed both fad and brilliant into the concept of what is created. and, it’s not enough. it’s not you. and, one day you just can’t try to be like ‘them’ anymore. you turn your back on whoever loves and trusts you as this maker of things in their way, and you make something which is so off the wall and yet so perfectly beautiful to you that you feel like you’ve made nature itself. of that, from that, you’ve now got a ‘style’. genius is ‘style’, the ability to be creative over a range of ideas and materials — turning the world into a musicality of connected physical melodies.

what are your thoughts?

interesting, the skilled
old surfers… hogging,
bending
the waves.

more intelligent,
the boys pushed
aside,
strongly delicate,
curl
of wave —

how beautiful, they see
pelicans
dive
glide
skimming and skim again
the skins of ocean;
fly to the sun.

in a poem, I want something to derive out of the poem, rather than something more important than the poem replacing the poem.

i mean that a poem is more than an aphorism. the cat in this image is electric, because you don’t know what it’s going to do. but, the composition of the image evokes possible and emotionally interesting moves the cat might make. if the cat were looking out into the courtyard it would be another image. that is, that a poem isn’t accidental… it’s not a subjective thing: you enter it and follow it. you can’t enter it and redecorate it and have it still be a poem. even if you’re making it into your own experience. it’s still something that’s directing your imagination.

a gold lagoon in winter white
holds mermaids, swans
and silver lightning… what’s
the use of always fighting?

a skating rink in central park,
a tiny frock of latin pink…
a smiling wink,
around we’d whirl.

that year in Pennsylvania,
or, was it in Japan?
you were my sweetie sweetheart,
I was your happy man.

then, atop the tower of Ile de france,
heel to heel, we danced through paris;
moon and stars sang twice a day…

do we skip the tour
of someone else’s slumber-dreams?
dreams of chevalier and remy martin,
step off the train and make our own,
and light the lamps for marijuana?
“no!”?? “um, yes. .. but it’s pre-code…!”
‘action!’

impossible, ma cherie. good night,
hello…
we really don’t know how to say hello…
aw, honey, let’s just say goodnight, hello,
impossible, good night, hello… .
we’re intangibles. on the movie screen.
let’s say goodnight,
and, wake up in another dream.

sliding down the pole
underneath the waves,
below the stream of never found,
underneath the graves.

on the pier, lays a book…
the pier sustains the book.
in the book’s a memory,
please don’t look too hard at me.

the book is in some melody
i’m singing in my shoes and socks,
i get them off, i do not need,
purple shorts and tie-dyed tee,
and, after i am done,
alone in skin, i wonder how
you’ll watch the world watch me.

now, i’m naked like an orphan, nothing on,
my heart is with the world,
but, the world sees sex, and sex is killing me…
i want to be free.

seals swim inside the sea,
flipping up and out of place,
locked inside the rubber water.
seals and lies make history, ‘look at me’…
each
word
swims
back
in
sleek…
each song i sing’s another wasted memory.

spinning in a melody,
what you say to light your day…
always in a rig’marol,
who you saw,
who you’ll blow.

your life is like a comet
stuck inside a train…
stopped in the rain,
stuck with your pain.

you used to play,
but, now you only localize:
cornered by your race,
it’s all about your face.

turning, twisting sideways in pain agony,
it hurts, but you’re above it all,
‘ironic’, like a dead boy’s dream —
that one, they feel the love you’ll give…

and, you’ve got to live.

always down for rock and roll,
don’t
look
around.

’cause life’s an under monster,
…feed you to the town.

the jangle of your tattoo tells
you’re finally humming,
but, you’re too busy screaming
to investigate what’s coming.

MGM lighting,
soft, and time glows on —
see them dance,
see them cry,
California dreaming people…
it’s a take… here we go,
there we’ve been,
Hollywood dreams us.

night slept by,
the moon and the stars
have all clocked out…
we’re alone and
sleeping time’s for keeping.
pony gal,
let’s not waste
the night sleeping.

today is 6 months from my 71st. birthday. my mind is clearer, especially after leaving the social poetry network site, then it’s been in the last ten years. work in writing and painting is starting to show progress.

I’m reading everyday, and going down to powell’s every day to drink coffee and read new books, and write and talk and edit. I’m putting together another poetry book, and I’m blogging here some thoughts I’ve got about writing and poetry. I’m reading poetry and poets every day, and looking at poetry critical and poetry circle poets and comments. there’s always something to think about, just as I always have feelings I cannot feel without pain or happiness, and want to say out in poetry or verse or as a song lyric.

I recommend becoming old if you’re still healthy enough to get old, and can still think young enough not to stay old when you get there.