Monday, January 25, 2010 8:26:07 PM
poem, poetry
Meander on by,
A little Satori,
A kick in the eye,
Oh, don’t worry baby
I won’t cry.
Another Herculean fight,
just to get through to the
cryptic side of another
bankrupt and moonless night.
And somehow forget
the locomotion
of the massive shoulders
of dawn;
when I lose a little of the best of me;
for a fleeting,
forever gone
stand-still moment
that I refuse to let go of
in a symphony of will.
At the cost
of another forgotten breath,
or another light that might have dimmed
among the mahogany
of that last fight sinned.
And forget it now,
empty soul, barroom death;
or adding another scar
to this blood-soaked
paperback,
filled with Haikus and marauding news;
spilling from page to page
and staining the broken
spine,
and obscuring all the blurbs,
of some worldly caged
high-tower sage
who could never, after all,
mind his mind, or think,
for his pen is broken
and run dry of ink.
And the Dostoyevskian
truths
silently jerk and pull
down
some dejected alley
of someone’s broken soul;
or a dream you no longer
belong in
seen through the
time-cracked lens
of
our
9 mm
lives.
And the
clicking,
clicking,
clicking,
that never stops;
as the humid,
tepid
breeze
carries away
the little bit
of you
that somehow
always survives.
Saturday, January 23, 2010 11:18:37 PM
poem, poetry
I think my heart is being kicked around
Somewhere in Brooklyn,
Or some back alley in SOHO,
On some dirty street corner,
Because it no longer lives inside my chest.
And I go down to one knee so often,
And I wish I could say so much more;
But the nights are so dark -- and oh my God,
The days are endless.
Why did she lie to me?
And I wonder if their is a lonely woman walking
The streets of Spanish Harlem,
Hoping that someone is thinking of her.
Or a girl looking out over an ocean
In some far away place,
Thinking of eyes not yet looked into.
And I could tell her so much.
Saturday, February 21, 2009 9:46:41 PM
This article first appeared in 2007
An online T-shirt company is pressing onto T-shirts the faces and quotes of the world`s most renowned novelists, poets, philosophers and dramatists.
Literary Rags sell their T-shirts at
www.literaryrags.com. LitRags has over 100 authors to choose from, but plans on adding a staggering two hundred others in the future. "Currently, we have a nice array of choices", says company founder, Dave Richardson, there is someone for everyone, but we want to continue to add writers because there's been so many great thinkers throughout history."
literaryrags.com has been operating for several years and feels their website and the quality of their product shows with satisfied customers. "We use only the highest quality T-shirts," says Richardson, "that has been our idea from the beginning - we didn`t want to use poor quality T-shirts just to keep the cost down. We want the customer to be extremely happy with the quality."
literaryrags.com market their T-shirts primarily through popular literary blogs, and have seen a wide range of customers. "It`s been interesting and fun," says Richardson, "we get e-mails and guest book entries from people of all walks of life," he adds. LitRags has always believed that literature and the love of great authors is still very much alive in today`s hi-tech world.
Literary Rags realizes that there are other T-shirt companies out there that dabble in some of the more well known authors, but feel what separates them is the company`s exclusivity to literature and the uncommon list of authors. "What makes your site so different is the unique selection of authors," said Levi Asher of LitKicks.com.
Once asked what makes Literary Rags different, Richardson answered, "They are simply T-shirt people with an occasional literary endeavor, and we are constant literary people with a T-shirt endeavor."
Saturday, February 21, 2009 8:08:25 PM
Charles Bukowski, writer, madman, poet
I remember when I first started reading Charles Bukowski in earnest -- it was the summer of '92 -- if I remember correctly, when I was staying with a friend in North Jersey in a one bedroom, five story walk-up.
We had picked up "The Last Night of the Earth Poems" while in the East Village earlier in the day, and started taking turns reading aloud. It was the start of a suffocatingly warm summer night, and we had this enormous blue cooler filled with beer sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. The windows were wide open, but the air was thick, like only east coast city summer can be. It was just around sundown, and the light was intoxicating in itself. I could see the Twin Towers through the kitchen window. And right beneath us was Bayonne's Avenue B, with all the summer-city sounds reaching up five stories and grabbing us by our souls.
We didn't think much of it at first, but as the night wore on, we began to see more and more clearly through to his genius. It was like a smack in the face. You just had to sit up and really listen. We finished the entire book, and then went back to certain passages, over and over again, until we were drunk; drunk with words, with beer, with midnight summer heat, and drunk with the idea of literary salvation.
I read a lot that summer, but as a marker in time, that was the book. Bukowski's like an old, lost dog, scratching at your back door...you just gotta let him in.
Saturday, February 21, 2009 1:35:45 AM
Jack kerouac, writer, poet
I remember the night passing through Lowell, Mass., the birthplace of Jack kerouac, like it was yesterday. It was a warm summer night, and I was driving around thinking that I would see signs everywhere telling where this had happened and that had happened. But none of that was there; in fact, I stopped at a red light and asked a young couple where Jack kerouac's grave was, and they said "who?"
I eventually found a 7-11 and just asked person after person until someone knew. I also stumbled upon this little park tucked beneath the shadows of an old textile mill turned apartment building, with these looming monoliths inscribed with samples of Jack's work -- I loved just sitting there on the bench; it was after midnight and nobody was around, and it was that late summer-night quiet, and I had a beer in a bag, and I felt like singing.
After that I drove around looking for a bar where Jack might have hung out, but everyone seemed vague and uninterested, and after many whiskies with 8 oz. glass tap-beer chasers, the kind you can only find in old neighborhood saloons, I finally got tired and just hit the Lowell Connector and left the famed Merrimack behind.
My Opera
