18. Saginaw #5- ed. David Harrison Horton, featuring David Schrader, Trevor Calvert, Sohrab Sepehri translated by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati
 

This magazine is literally made is China. I'm supposed to be in an issue sooner or later. I was supposed to go to a play this weekend but slept through it. I watched half of the 49ers game but slept through the rest. I ate Chinese food and then slept on it.

I went to the Oakland Music Festival this weekend with friends, I wish I slept through it, all of the "small stage" acts should have been the headliners, and all the headliners should have not been performing (with the exception of J-Boogie).

And then The Night Lite for drinks and a show. And then down to 5th and Embarcadero on the Oakland waterfront for beach bonfire and beers. And then it was 5:30AM and we went home.

I remember Kazim Ali at the SPD Bee-In, he was anxious to get to a bar to watch the season finale of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Labor Day, Oakland, CA, pool party.

17. Songs For Jadina- Alan Chong Lau
Greenfield Review

 

16. At Me- Brandon Downing
Octopus Books

Brandon gave me a copy At Me at his Woolsey Heights reading a couple years ago. 

Brandon made this video which "premiered on January 16, 2010, at SpaceSpace in Ridgewood, New York, at Poetry Time's showcase of John Sakkis, Niina Pollari, and John Coletti."





I wrote this little poem called "Knowing" in dedication to Brandon and his video (the plane crash footage is taken from an amazing Nic Cage disaster movie (movie disaster?) called Knowing; it's about ancient aliens, the Old Testament, and the end of the world, it's a ridiculously fun (ridiculous?) popcorn flick that aspires to be more, and fails miserably, I loved it. 

Knowing

for Brandon Downing

The wheat field 

an ocean landscape,

A blown out Eden 

outside of Alexandria,

And the president 

wouldn't wait 

as long as he did

If the sun ejaculated 

an apocalypse

Penetrating 1.2 miles 

into the earth's crust

Val Thor 

spoke of Christ's presence

In the Universe, 

just like 

Nic Cage's Dad was a preacher 

with 4 faces, The Lion, 

The Man, An Ox, The Eagle

Ezekiel's Wheel 

was a primitive mechanism

Heralding the Phoenix Lights

The city is a desert, 

some call this 

“missing time”

And when I looked 

I saw a cigar-shaped windstorm 

hovering silently, 

the desert turned to faces

And the city turned to wings 

until the sky became a black stone 

too crowded for the movies

mosquito is graffiti

abatement

15. Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999- Pierre Joris
Wesleyan University Press

Here are a couple of poems written in response to Pierre Joris, from my manuscript FIEND FOLIO.

I.

after Pierre Joris

the encomium explodes

by way

of text bubbles

into three fleshy

cigarette

burns the sacred

putrefaction

the scarification

below the wrist

figures fool’s

gold figures

this summer

campout

caesura

an ecstatic twist

from

the follicle

protest molecule

spawns

spurious rumors

in Oakland

only rent

a river

the burns

palpitate skin

in water

into bite-sized
bundles

tied ribbon

floating warm

the live-

long day

II. 

after Pierre Joris

Range Rover to bright

brain poundage paper

though turntables be othered

on the scale of your breath control

I tic toc my minutes

NIMBY pansies get butterflies

“shadow pollution” kills birds

so rents go up and over

you laugh at the needles

that stick to your meddling

picket white fences painted

brown nosed babies

in some kind of fascination

we called it in from here

to there, hear her cowboy boots

drag while her fingers run

the lines of her underwear

the course is clear, do nothing,

resist, inspect your betters

newer and never

prepare your vacation, leave

California to the birds

no anemone can walk the earth

with false confidence from word

to thing on the freeway, scorched

in summer and baked

throughout the day

lunchtime is most visible

in its insistence proven

by sports talk radio, fasting

is only a parting of ways

expunged the cellular

creatures go down on you

en masse, with runner’s legs

the ligature of pay day

sews The Nightingale

and here comes the Leo,

overstaying his time, frightened

of his shadow, in the backyard

summer burn

I need your drama
like Mars Needs Moms

this groin this TWAMP

put 5ive on it, Johnny

go box tonight, Johnny

this Purple Heart,
my only heart
is smoked

Q: how many 90s mixtapes were ruined by a Rage Against The Machine song?

A: myriad

nobody knows what sorrow I've seen
slobber

14. Walt Whitman The Measure Of His Song- ed. Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom and Dan Campion 
Holy Cow! Press

OMG I want a nap.

I swear to OMG I read somewhere in this book that Whitman was a hermaphrodite, could it have been a clumsy metaphor I stupidly took literally as I drifted off to sleep-reading?

from Whitman's obit (nothing about intersexuality mentioned though, drats)

"Walt Whitman died at 6:43 p.m. on March 26, 1892 at the age of 72. Doctors discovered, in a 3-hour autopsy, that Whitman died of pulmonary emphysema or bronchial pneumonia, that the left lung had entirely collapsed, and the right was only barely functioning. The heart was surrounded by abscesses and "about two and a half quarts of water," according to the New York Times. Whitman's brain was removed and sent to the American Anthropometric Society, where it was accidentally destroyed..."

The cover color palette of this book reminds me of my Mom in the early 90s.
Punked perpetually through puberty by a peach n' green palette..., PUKE!
It's my parents 38th anniversary this Saturday, I'll be in Grass Valley saying so long Summer.

and by size queens
I mean women who're into tall men

just shut up Hoyt Smith

you're a honey of a man

I'm the Intern Coordinator

nebbish
nebbish
nebbish
nebbish
nebbish
nebbish 

13. Let The Smoke & The Tracks Carry You!- Christina Fisher, Patrick James Dunagan and Derek Fenner 
 Bird And Beckett Books

Pretty sure Patrick Dunagan gave me this chap after his, Jack Hirschman and Ava Koohbor's reading at Bird And Beckett. This would have been the night of the Anselm Hollo memorial reading at CCA, a fantastic tribute by the way; ribald, moving, celebratory, I was honored to have been invited to participate in it. 

After the memorial reading a bunch of us headed over to Bird And Beckett. Drinks were had, Paul Hoover showed up, Dunagan was in a heckling mood. Jack Hirschman was on fire, he read an Epithalamion for Amber Tamblyn and David Cross, the one he read at their wedding. Hirschman is Amber Tamblyn's godfather, trip out huh? After the reading I introduced myself to Hirschman while waiting in line for the bathroom, he goes "SAKKIS!, you're Angelos's nephew!, " I said "yes, nice to meet you," and he goes "you'll have to come to Spec's sometime..."...

SPELLS

the line as a psychometric unit,

proceed associationally

CAP. KIRK

THE PRIME

            DIRECTIVE

TO WORSHIP

NEPTUNE LEAPING

AND LINGERING

PROGRESSIVE

HOUSE/ IT BELONGS

TO THE DEAD

ALTERNATE EARTH

ROMAN INSURGENT

XENOMORPH

12. Stained Glass Windows Of California- Julien Poirier 
Ugly Duckling Presse

SAKKIS Yes: the dream I had. Also, since you published early bone structure of "Way Too West" in BOTH BOTH and it gave me courage, since at that point I was completely unsure and no one I sent work to would comment, you're a hero in my book, you APPEAR, since the book does contain some messages I wrote in real time. To you and Noel Black, who also read and critiqued early Goalies.

Collab. Coffee.

---Julien

JPOIRIER,

One of my all time favorite lines from The X-Files, in the meta episode Jose Chung's From Outer Space, the dork says to Mulder and Scully "I didn't play Dungeons And Dragons all those years and not learn a little something about COURAGE"...I'm glad I gave you courage, you're a beast, a courageous beast. And those WTW poems are BEASTIAL, straight Monster's Manual BEASTIAL, was happy to publish them.
 

Sakkis,

I still have my old Monster's Manual, the only D&D book I retained.

I was a DM --- peaked in 5th grade.

Well, I don't want to express false modesty abt the poems you published in BB, which I think/thot are good, just to say I was in uncharted freefall back when I sent them / doing something different (for me) since I'd come to the end of writing a certain way / and it was important to me that you saw enough to publish them at that moment because once I saw them in print I was able to say AHHHH, and move with Alacrity into the Land's small intestines and dim suites in the spinal cloud...

Let's do the collab. For some reason I was thinking couplets. I mean, you send line, I write rhyming line + next line, then you rhyme etc etc. 

Anyway we could warm up that way.

Or we could send line w/o end wordssss

"I was looking for a place to ____"

Or you could take this stanza...

Wabash agitprop

Got my thetoric in the bodyshop

Mylanta schooner

I navigate by lunar tic

...and shred it.

Or a little surrealist glee club epaualet: 

A chocolate lobster 

in tangerine tinfoil

(bib)

in a shotgun viaduct / Tyrolean macaroni / sides with the Luftwaffe:

+ News Items

G.W. Bush visits the Luftwaffle House to make fun of Michael du Coleslaw for being a big waffler on bomb runs over Texaco

Then has a massive heart attack and his head goes SPLAT in his wiffled Poindexters---Karate

chop---Whah!

Burrito Transformer

Hellraiser Taco Truck

Virtual Reality Gauntlet

In Guinevere's open air head shop

Beans n Rice

Beans n Rice

Goin fast goin just like a rubber Louie blockade

Lookin for the orangeade

lookin for the full fade duckbill liberty bell shaved 

oer the temple

....back to you....

JP