Lurch Back...

To lurch back from the Aughts to the Nineties: Poetry Incarnation '05 and the Highwire Gallery Philly Free School shows, as dramatic public displays of sangfroid around cultural and other forms of chaos, were presaged by the work I did with the Outlaw Playwrights in State College in the Nineties. These three one-acts are what I deem most worthy of preservation from that experience. By the by: Mortuary Puppies was produced by the Outlaws in State College on 2-11-99, while I was living in Manhattan. I had left the script for the Outlaws to use right before I left State College in late November '98. I didn't find out about the production until the late summer of '99, when I moved into Logan Square. What the Aughts were to be loomed large by then.

Adam Fieled (State College, Pa): "Song for Genevieve"

Flip-flop her legs (so soon!) are perfect
Sunlight burnishes her kneecaps
She’s a swan of smoothness
A mint to be dissolved in (strong!) tea
An oyster to be de-pearled w/ two hands

                     (Yawning
                              gape
                                of coagulated
                                      sunset—

                                     Perpetual cricket
                                 buzz sticks
                          to pure ancient
            leaves in breezes—)

She’s poignant, pained, church-stained
Gravy-lust, the merchandise of sailors (tides!)
Orally injected (wet!) anti-depressants
You’re killing me (Hepburning my body!)
Spread a flag over yr naked back, arch—
over the wall— push!— over the sky;
Stars, planets, universes yarned in a spin;
Navigate the (gated!) grave of the Milky Way;
Eat the chocolate donut of midnight—

© Adam Fieled 1998

originally appeared in hutt and Starfish

Poetry Incarnation '05 on P.F.S. Post

In the days following Poetry Incarnation '05, I posted to P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post) about the reading. The big revelation here is something I'd forgotten: the entire audience, and all the poets, managed to hang on and remain at the Khyber for the entire five-hour duration of the event. Or just about. Even as I have to face the contradiction, many years later, of never having put together another reading quite as expansive. P.F.S. Presents (Philly Free School Presents) was a smaller endeavor in Chicago and NYC.

Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Luggage

 

Luggage lugged in by refugees from wealthy
families lay beside the bed we occupied, to
do our dance. I saw it, in the middle of the action—
black leather, initials embossed in gold— tried
not to notice that it was sentient. It berated you,
for the duration of our tryst, delineating ways this
was a betrayal, to sleep with someone of inferior caste
status, with steep consequences. When a severed
head broke briefly out of a suitcase, it reminded
you, red-tongued, the debt you owed could never
be paid back, the grisliness you visited upon your
clan could never be rectified. All the severed head
looked to me like was roses with thorny stems, tied
in a knot— clairvoyantly, you saw the real deal. The sleeping roll

predicted your condition as mendicant when the sex
was over, the word passed. The abomination between
your legs could only be alleviated by the anti-Vaseline
which sat leeringly on top of the luggage pile, lubed
from yellow to fluorescent blue. The luggage, to me,
was just prejudice from a sector I chose not to understand.
All I knew is that our bodies compelled us to co-mingle.
That was enough. Off in the distance, trumpets blared
to begin a holy war. Red seas were parted. A king perused
the catalogue they’d given him, jeweled scepter scoping
out highlights. I was a pawn. He knew— if you own the guns
& the money, everything else comes, too. You, then, fell
asleep. I was entranced by the early sunlight. I thought
of states of grace, you dreamed of Red Death. More luggage.

© Adam Fieled 2022-2025

Set List: Poetry Incarnation '05

So, there it was, folks, Poetry Incarnation '05: thirty readers (the actual set list, past this one, contained a few additions and subtractions), seventy paying attendees for $5 at the door, a hot night in July, and a first demarcative line in the sand drawn separating the Aughts in Philly from other times and other places. 

The Fall: No Fall

As per other notable conservation moves: two versions of Mary Harju's The Fall: the initial, Aughts, September 2008 version, with Mary's own commentary; and the 2016 ekphrasis version, with my poem to accompany the painting. And an extra Fall into the bargain.

Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Starlight II"

What starlight means to someone sober, such
as I was not in the old days— it would have to be
the sense of lives lived not uselessly. As in, who
we were had a burning sense of purpose, even
amid the ecstasy of moments we lived through—
gossamer ones to hold onto. It was not for nothing
who we were, what we did. How the grass-plots,
yellow-leaved autumn trees, other foliage, informed
us, heedless as we were, was that we would gradually
ripen into a long life no matter what. If that life
would have to begin with me, so be it. The sense
of sexual union, crescendo, orgasm, was in our
brains too, about what had moved us, & made
all the libidinous business resonate on a double level.

We were in each other’s bodies, and in each other’s
brains, I dare say, the right way. If an odder family
has never been seen, a family we were. The starlight
which could descend on Mary’s room— eastern
exposure, lavishing the long wooden dresser with
flat countertop surface, Mary’s various paraphernalia—
has now transmuted into a knowing stripe. Assured,
also, of enterprises, personal and otherwise, coming
full circle, just as Abby used circular forms to out-
Klimt Gustav himself, and of eternity borne out
through trust in nature, long patience. So I leave
myself with Mary there, doing what we always did,
but precocious about vindication, passages, reality.
The starlight finds a little place for us, for this.

© Adam Fieled 2026