Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Pride (in the name of love)

 

The buildings are the road, voyage, reason.
The spirit you think is there, in architecture, is there,
along with other spirits, namely, spirits
hewn into coexisting nature, creating a sublime sense of
balance. Apotheosis of coexistences.
The collection of buildings here is resonant— shudders,
palpitates, resonates. Where & how you get touched
is the enchantment variable. It could be Fayette Street (two churches),
City Hall in May, Butler Pike, even the lunar landing
lunacy of Dekalb Pike. The road you travel on is into the cosmos.
This is it— my Philadelphia. The buildings say everything.
What I say now is reason again, to bring us
roundabout— the buildings are the road.
What is really in the cosmos remains the mystery.

***attached image of Calvary Episcopal Church, Fayette Street, Conshohocken***

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Feast or Famine in The Seattle Star

Feast or Famine, double sonnet from Something Solid, in The Seattle Star.

Feast or Famine is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound. 

Dance Monkey (draft)

 Here's how Beams sequel Dance Monkey stands, as of July 2, 2024.

Equations #34 (Thesis) in Listenlight

 A 2010 page from Listenlight, including this Equation, in The Wayback Machine. 

Equations: Thesis: #20

But what the Devil does falls down around the heels when withholding is the only option. Ginny teaches me this, despite the great difference in our ages (my thirty-three to her twenty-two). When we try to escape, its’ to a place of no consummations; when we go up, it’s like a tarantula’s leg that points back down again. Ginny must withhold because she belongs, in every sense, to her family. The luscious red hair, bulging green eyes, extreme voluptuousness of her appearance belie her raison d’etre: to bind and fasten. As she binds and fastens, there’s more looseness than she realizes: you have to give in sometimes to get the goods. The truth emerges, after several months of “almost there”: Ginny is a virgin. Ginny withholds because her parts have defects. Because she is sickly, her gorgeousness is one of the universe’s cruel jokes. The joke is on her and her would-be lovers, and, like most of the best jokes, it isn’t that funny. Ginny is one of those strange girls that seems to have no interests in life; that thinks that her body is her only mind; and that her body that is her mind must be so much an issue of blood that to blood it must return. To be a tart is simply recreation; but there is no sense of seriousness or duty behind it. Yet Ginny stands on the mountain of her own pulchritude, and surveys the carnage at the bottom with calculated niceness. She has never known submissiveness, even as part of a strategic plan, and never will; so she perpetually awakens to see she’s done no real damage. Her mountain is a reverse mountain, which runs from the soil into hell. At a key moment, in the middle of a summer at the end of the Aughts, with Trish unhappily in Manhattan, Tobi fading, the Free School a memory, Ginny and her friends take the Drop hostage. I earn the right and privilege to be in Ginny’s apartment (on Pine Street, down the street east from the Drop) several times, which resembles Julie’s, high ceilings, wooden floors. Ginny sits next to me on her sofa and watches children’s movies on her laptop. I try nothing. She wields an axe, and her physiology is resolutely shut-down, compacted. The Drop waves the white flag, and, as I knew even then, an era was ending. Everything about her group signaled that we’d all been having too much fun, and that the Center City-wide party was over. Actual sex was passe, beside the point. Besides, it was noticeable that when I walked around Center City that summer with Ginny, which I did, everyone looked at us as though we were a couple. Only I knew what was being withheld. The image crafted made me look studly. To her, that was more than enough. Funny: she wouldn’t do bars. She just did her translation of bar-life into coffee shops, Temple classrooms, occasional drama productions. She was, herself, her own production— when she wore low-cut tops, or dresses, she was showing everyone who she was, and her breasts were a bared switchblade. That equation: sex used as an over or undertone to or for violence, or just the threat of violence: was big for her. Her tits were a weapon which could extort from the world what she wanted. All our idealism was replaced with back to the grind cynicism. Ginny’s favorite dress for special occasions was black, and bared the fangs of her cleavage the right way.

Dance Monkey: Beams: Andy's Diner

 

                            “What they’re doing is about decomposition & decay.”
                                    Syrup shortage, pancakes on a greased plate.

                       Marilyn emanates from the wall, a frozen sense of vulnerable
                                   cattishness, James is ready to rebel as always.

                                    “Not really a restaurant, a group of tables.”
                            Los Angeles lives here in Conshohocken, mid-town

                                 Conshohocken. There’s a geographic center
                     to Andy’s Diner. Only, when it’s the Twenties, we wonder

                          why Natalie Wood is missing from the walls, where
                                  Marilyn holds court from, as the waiters

                                  greasy spoon our wishes into moderate checks.
                         Marilyn says from the poster, she’s only here to get laid.

                       I’m the last person to get a consistent performance out of her

The E-Sequence

E Sequence 1: Something Solid, Aughts Philly, The Painter.

E Sequence 2: Something Solid, Aughts Philly, The Studio.

E Sequence 3: Something Solid, Aughts Philly, Riot Grrrl.

E Sequence 4: Something Solid, Aughts Philly, Starlight.

E Sequence 5: Something Solid, Aughts Philly, Live Forever.

Equations

Equations 1, The Thesis Episodes, on PennSound.

Equations 2, The Jade Episodes, completing the dialectic & book, on PennSound. 

Dance Monkey: Apparition Poem #2041

A quarter of a century
has passed
since I took the teenage
townie to a new place
transgressive
in a subletted room
on West Nittany
if I have no regrets
it’s because those text-piles
on that carpeted floor
have passed into
ink somewhere
past that room
she has too
the second phase of the game

P.S. And both from and about those text-piles

Dance Monkey: Apparition Poems

Still in the process of writing a Beams sequel. Finished: Apparition Poems.

Dance Monkey: Madame Psychosis: Fragment: Jennifer

 

Jennifer steps out of maggots & dust—
       a goddess of trailers, who’ll try, as she must,
                    to bless, as a cornfield, the rigors of lust—

coming from me into her like a spark,
       glazing with moonlight the rooms where, in dark,
                          the ooze of the universe made a new mark.

P.S. One of the more notable rooms.

Vlad Pogorelov's Derelict (ur-text)

In slightly mangled form, here is the ur-textual gem itself: the original pdf for Vlad Pogorelov's 1997 Repossessed Head chapbook Derelict. I picked it up at a Vlad reading, just before he left Philly, at Pi on South Street in 1998. I'd already known Vlad for a few years by then and was suitably impressed. He was older than me by six years, but was the first writer close enough to be from my own generation, who had done anything notable. Peace.