Curiosities, Returns: Wittgenstein's Song on P.F.S. Post

From Returns, Curiosities: Wittgenstein's Song on P.F.S. Post.

Wittgenstein's Song is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.

At the Train Station

At the Train Station, by Vlad Pogorelov (seen here at a reading in Cali), now up on P.F.S. Post, is a poem I knew and enjoyed in the Nineties. Vlad released the poem as part of the chapbook collection Derelict, which was slanted towards a multi-media presentation, and which appeared in '98. 

There was a night in early 2000, when I got up and read the poem at an open mike reading at the Painted Bride in Philly. It was an homage to Vlad, who'd left Philly by then and migrated to San Fran (he's now based in Rocklin, near Sacramento). Genevieve Walsh, who I was with that night, congratulated me for having "balls of steel" for getting up in front of Kevin O'Neill and the rest and reading such a provocative piece. 

Vlad is now finally about to release a second edition of Derelict, and as I re-read it, remembering other old favorites like No. 105, all my memories of the 90s Philly poetry scene come rushing back.  

Germantown Pike: A Mini-Collage

I.

“Why Plymouth Meeting at night still haunts me— when you look down Germantown Pike from a car at, say, 2 am on a Sunday morning, if it was merely desolation to see, there’d be nothing to say. Why something must be said is that Germantown Pike and the environs (Plymouth Meeting Mall, Fed Ex, Starbucks) all exude such a sense of foreboding, menace, and compressed anti-matter or anti-material nothingness, from having been built in a jagged, ill-shaped, ill-placed fashion, that the consciousness of the individual is sucked into a vacuum from seeing them that it cannot (in my case, at least) ever really recover from. It is man’s inhumanity to man hewn into architecture; and crisp, poignant to understand that Plymouth Meeting by daylight looks innocuous or even impressive. Daytime world and nighttime world in Plymouth Meeting are diametrically opposed.”

II.

                                                            Big

                                                         square

                                                        buildings,

                                                           hulks,

                                                           hover

                                                           above

                                                       the individual,

                                                            who, if

                                                          abandoned,

                                                          will wander

                                                            all night,

                                                              freeze

                                                             to death

                                                            in cement—

                                                              crucified,

                                                             also, by

                                                              concrete—

                                                               warped

                                                              landscape,

                                                        Germantown Pike,

                                                             sheer drops,

                                                                overpass,

                                                               pass away—

III.

Pat offered to give me a ride,

as air was being sucked from

my lungs, oppressive wafts from

parking lots layered over other

parking lots layered under other

parking lots, hewn above concrete

fields, more concrete fields, hewn

in rain-slicked black on a November

night, splattered like black paint

with silver dabs for icy moonlight—

Pat could barely drive her car, we

were trapped in the maze of the first

parking lot for fifteen minutes, Pat

encouraged herself past all the criss-

cross lanes, zany yellow-striped

other lanes, even more zany sense

that cars were converging at odd

angles to us (they could destroy

us, I thought, they’re demon

vehicles sprung mechanically from Hades)—

Pat slipped inconspicuously onto

Germantown Pike, which stuck out

its tongue to lick us, turn us white

as sheets, where all was concrete

& sodomy beneath concrete above us,

yet we escaped, over to Chemical Road,

it was only half as sinister, Pat

almost crashed, but found herself

surviving, as did I, as Germantown

Pike laughed, saying Not next time, babes—

New Poems in Otoliths (57)

Two new ballads in Otoliths 57. Many thanks to Mark Young.

Here is Otoliths 57 in its entirety. And in print.

P.S. Listen to Wayfaring Angel on mp3. 

De Profundis: A Ballad

The crowd is called in, to witness the kill;
   drunk & disheveled, bitter and chilled;
he follows them in by an effort of will.

The tiles are cleaned, to be spattered with blood;
   trickles or gushes, geysers or floods;
a yellow-ish light drowns the faces, like mud—

he likes who he is, in this outlaw brigade;
   not a charmed prince in the price that he's paid;
he'll have to remainder this bargain he's made—

so stands at the edge, & yells with the crowd;
   overly hostile, overly loud;
the victim lies prostrate beneath a white shroud.

It soon gets uncovered, revealing a man
   he thought was another, not from his clan;
but seeing his likeness is more than he'll stand.

And yet he still lingers, as needles are drawn;
   screaming and preening, a circuit turned on;
he wishes he lay there himself, nearly gone—

yellow the light, and more yellow his soul;
    stripped of pretensions, stripped of controls;
he runs for the exit like rats for a hole.

The man was my father, the shrouded quite near.
    Hounded by anguish, hounded by fear,
what lingered or perished was never made clear—

Aughts Philly Affirmation

One of the most striking affirmations I've seen that Aughts Philly really was a special time/place. 

Stain Bar on Google Drive

Me reading at Stain Bar, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on March 30, 2007, for Mipo, Mary, Mary, & others.

P.S. Live in Brooklyn is now a Top 10 hit on Soundclick.