Sep 26, 2013

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.

Sep 24, 2013


Labor Day, Oakland, CA, pool party.

Sep 20, 2013

17. Songs For Jadina- Alan Chong Lau
Greenfield Review



Sep 17, 2013

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

Sep 13, 2013

mosquito is graffiti

abatement

Sep 12, 2013

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

Sep 11, 2013

Sep 6, 2013

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

A: myriad

nobody knows what sorrow I've seen
slobber

Sep 5, 2013

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 





Sep 4, 2013

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..."...

Sep 3, 2013

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