The pennycandystore beyond the El

 The pennycandystore beyond the El
 is where I first
                 fell in love
                             with unreality
 Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
 of that september afternoon
 A cat upon the counter moved among
                           the licorice sticks
                and tootsie rolls
        and Oh Boy Gum

 Outside the leaves were falling as they died

 A wind had blown away the sun

 A girl ran in
 Her hair was rainy
 Her breasts were breathless in the little room

 Outside the leaves were falling
                      and they cried
                                   Too soon!  too soon!

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Editor’s note: Today’s poem comes from an actual reader email!

What the fuck
Is this website?

All of that extraterrestrial space
Just yellowed paper and candle wax
She confided
to no one in particular

***

It is important to note
That Mother Teresa

It is important to note that Mother Teresa
Left mountains of paper bundled and stacked
Fifty years in the extraterrestrial space
And that those mountains seemed like pebbles
And that this was her big secret.

They couldn’t fill the space
and t
Mother Teresa’s
Train never arrived.
(anotherwaytosayit)

Mother Teresa
Confided that
Even with her ticket and fifty years on the platform
Her train never arrived.

And so what I wanna know is this:
whaty’ll I get for my ticket?

O It’s Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
of her riant belly’s fooling bore
- When The Sun Begins To(with a phrasing crease
of hot subliminal lips,as if a score
of youngest angels suddenly should stretch neat necks
just to see how always squirms
the skillful mystery of Hell)me suddenly

grips in chuckles of supreme sex.

In The Good Old Summer Time.
My gorgeous bullet in tickling intuitive flight
aches,just,simply,into,her. Thirsty
stirring. (Must be summer. Hush. Worms).

But It’s Nicer To Lie in Bed
-eh? I’m

not. Again. Hush. God. Please hold. Tight

– E.E. Cummings

An everyday order belies the incredible weirdness of life.   There are phrases and words and compliments and mannerisms and womannerisms and made up words and single and double and triple entendres all like a giant raging river and it’s dammed and controlled by whatisit? our language or our God or our culture or our wommanerisms or our nationality?  I won’t even venture a guess.  But it’s controlled – only slightly, barely, as if a tiny hole would bring the whole thing crashing down.  It’s controlled and harnessed, as best as can be expected by the things we take for granted.  The power of language and ideas and conversations and arguments and confusion and boredom.  It’s all important.  This video plays with language the way today’s child plays a video game.  It’s sure-footed and quick and it comes out of a place apart – let’s call it the shore of the river that’s dammed by God.  Was that a pun?  Dammed by God.  Damned by God.  Does that even have to make sense?  Remember the river is life or truth or something I probably didn’t clarify because I never claimed to know in the first place.

The things I don’t know are probably not answers to questions.  They are things though, I can tell you that – they are items that can be quantified and probably stacked like books.  But books are filled with more things listed on pages.  Those pages are counted and numbered and then read and turned-over.  The aggregate of those things leads to less things but bigger things.  Bigger things are probably more important things; things with weight.  What is the thing of a book?

2666 is 900 pages of things that I’ve read and loved and when you ask me what is the book about? I answer back that it is probably…… probably about life – life like living, the verb part of life, the noun.  It’s a documentation of many things that are semi-related but man, they are barely semi-related.  The only thing linking them is the beating heart and blood and raging stupid sweaty hormonal thoughts of the characters involved.  God are they stupid.  God, did I love this book.  What was it about?  It’s about that god damn river.  Did we even get to the part where we wonder where the river originated and to where it leads?  Do metaphors have myths and origins?

– Einstein & Freud & Jack –

Death is a dead, at least that’s what Freud said.

Long considering, he finally thought

Life but a detour longer or less long;

Maybe that’s why the going gets so rough.

When Einstein wrote to ask him what he thought

Science might do for world peace, Freud wrote back:

Not much. And took the occasion to point out

That science too begins and ends in myth.

His myth was of the sons conspired together

To kill the father and share out his flesh,

Blood, power, women, and the primal guilt

Thereon entailed, which they must strive

Vainly to expiate by sacrifice,

Fixed on all generations since, of sons.

Exiled in London, a surviving Jew,

Freud died of cancer before the war began

That Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about

Advising the research be started that,

Come seven years of dying fathers, dying sons,

In general massacre would end the same.

Einstein. He said that if it were to do

Again, he’d sooner be a plumber. He

Died too. We live on sayings said in myths,

And die of them as well, or ill. That’s that,

Of making many books there is no end,

And like it saith in the book before that one,

What God wants, don’t you forget it, Jack,

Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.

– Howard Nemerov

Winter

I am tired of the way the stale air
lies when my radiator rattles and pings and
mostespeciallythat
it is defensive about it.
go ahead and hiss

you sonofabitch radiator.

your air is used
but I breath it anyway, but
it’s not my fault. whatelseamIgonnado?

I was just out there…
andnowImbackin because
winter is what you come in from and wait
out

present company be damned.