New Emptyscapes up at Alias Books now through whenever.
3163 Glendale Blvd, LA CA 90039
October 17, 2019
A Legacy-Defining Moment
December 23, 2017
The One
I am the one
waiting for the One.
I have never entered a room
without hoping that the One
I am waiting for
might be found there.
Despite decades of disappointment,
I still look for her in every face,
looking for somebody to become that place
where everything that falls apart
falls into place.
But if I found her, I wouldn’t want her,
for as long as the possibility
of somebody else wanting me exists,
I will always want somebody else.
And I realize now that if she ever does arrive
it will not be in the prime of either of our lives,
at a cocktail party with a drink in her hand,
but that she is more likely to arrive holding a bedpan
as I am breathing my last in a hospital bed.
Only then, with restlessness and hope extinguished,
and all other options exhausted,
will I finally be ready
for the One.
March 23, 2016
Golden Waters
Instead of doing my own work,
I took a long hard look
at somebody else’s work,
in the hope of being pleasantly relieved
by how bad it was.
But, much as I tried to deny it,
it was undeniably good.
And it pours out of him
like a gusher from a golden fountain
that never stops flowing.
Compared to this strained trickle
from a blocked and rusty faucet.
I take consolation
in how much it has cost me,
as if that might somehow redeem it.
Which, of course, it doesn’t.
But I don’t have much else
to take consolation in.
February 23, 2015
Hooked on a Feeling
I marvel at my feelings,
but I don’t trust them.
I’m dazzled by her,
but I don’t trust her either.
I’m not sure that she even likes me.
Which is fine, I don’t like her much either.
December 9, 2014
Straight out of Goteborg
Matt Johnson’s Inertia Variations film/ installation
will be presented in Gothenburg, Sweden this month.
http://konstepidemin.se/kalender/radio-cineola-the-inertia-variations
http://www.rodasten.com/rs_events/view/radio_cineola_sv/?lang=se
October 11, 2014
Long Beach Poetry Festival
I will be among the twenty more (or less) ‘outstanding poets’
reading at the Long Beach Poetry Festival. Sat Oct 18th, 5pm
Bungalow Building 727 N Pine Avenue, Long Beach, CA
April 13, 2013
Ode to Invented Melancholy
Daunted by the energy that might be unleashed
were I to concentrate on the supposed task –
of what it might subtract, exact and adulterate; and of
the gagging staleness that could issue forth, if finally
penetrated, from something so long suppressed.
Succumbing instead to these afternoons of claustrophobic
wandering and restless prostration. Committed, only
to non-commitment. Driven, only to distraction.
January 21, 2013
The Measure of a Man
A long time ago I made a decision
to become a failure. It wasn’t
as easy as I thought: browsing through life
from one distraction to the next, while waiting
for the last lost moment to become unseizable.
As if there were some fundamental honesty
to not striving: There wasn’t.
I suspected it all along.
January 13, 2013
LXXXV
There are no levees capable
of withstanding the torrents of distraction
that surge through my mind. Tender
resentments, useless trivia and tired lusts
are carried along like debris on a swollen river,
from which, very occasionally, a lucid thought
emerges – only to be sucked back down
into the sewage of pettiness and vanity.
John Tottenham 