Weekend Edition
November 26 - 28, 2010

Help Us to Pray for Craig
By MATT DENNISON

She dusted the top of the little tv
in a final swirl of completion upon
the pirouette of emptying herself
from whatever hell a marriage could be.  
5000 miles away, he would be drunk
for sure, spending all that big danger
money that should have been hers
on little brown girls and scotch. 
She wrote  See ya Asshole!!! 
across the screen, her ringless fingertip
thick with dust so heavy she feared
she would bleed pure joy if cut.  Every good
story’s a horror story, her mother had always
looked up to say.  And every good story
comes true, she had learned to reply for the
gift of a smile, not knowing, but now she
knew.  She started to waltz the last box through
the wide open door, then thought to leave
the tv set on—her only true moment
of meanness.  And the talking head zizzled
and snapped, crying kidnap!  kidnap!  as her
eyes shot straight to the face she loathed
and the heavy gun laid on his neck near
the tears for his wife, his loving wife back
home keeping him alive, is all...   is the
only thought keeping...    O goddamn, she thought
as she saw the news crew descending en masse,
microphones lowered—fell to her knees and wept
her hand full on the screen, his little face
peeking between fingers so true
for the 5 o’clock news.

After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans (street musician, psych-tech, riverboat something-or-other, door-to-door poetry peddler, etc.), Matt Dennison finished his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University where he won the National Sigma Tau Delta essay competition (as judged by X.J. Kennedy).  He currently lives in a 100-year-old house with "lots of potential."

Plastic Santa
by ERIC CHAET

South Side, 1956 or ’57, I guess, Christmas time
plastic Santas given away with purchase
of washing machines or refrigerators
Polk Brothers crowded store on 63rd Street—
before malls, satellites, computers, smart phones—
they sponsored the Robin Hood show I watched on TV—
Robin was righteous, cunning, & skillful
the sheriff of Nottingham was betraying the people
as in Chicago Mayor Daley’s appointees—
cops, transit workers, street repair crews
guys you had to pay to enter or leave the world
take bets on horse races, sell liquor, pimp whores, etc.
& who went door to door at election time
to tell you who to vote for
like bullies at school—
no one even mentioned it or anything unjust or crazy
I had no idea what to do
& it hadn’t even occurred to me to control my anxiety.

One afternoon after school
trying to come up with a destination, destiny
I walked back & forth about a mile
California Boulevard to Kedzie Avenue
64th, 65th, 66th Street
& about half a mile back & forth
between 63rd & Marquette Boulevard
Richmond, Francisco, Mozart, Whipple, Albany, Troy—
hours—like a tiger in a cage—
Jesus! they use you to prop up what you tried to undo!—
dark early, little houses, dirty crusted snow
plastic Santas on porches
little red, green, spooky blue lights
like stars, I looked up but couldn’t see
sky covered with clouds, streetlamp bubble
cars coated with frozen grime along curbs.

When I gave up & went home—
nuclear family—each struggling forward alone—
my absence never mentioned, maybe never noticed.

Eric Chaet has had poems published across the USA and in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, often in translation. Coach House Press, Toronto, published his Old Buzzard of No-Man's Land in 1974. In 1977, Tick Crick Records, Missouri, released an album of his songs, Solid and Sound.  In the mid 80's to early 90's, he silk-screened posters on cloth, and hitchhiked back and forth across the USA stapling them to utility poles. In 1994, he released the second edition of How To Change the World Forever For Better.  In 2001, he put out People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways, mainly narrative.  He attempts to become ever more competent, and to practice righteousness and loving-kindness, from and in Wisconsin, USA. His website, 100 So-Called Poems, is at http://www.ericchaetpoems.com.

merzttp://
by MAXWELL CLARK

“The Further Chronicles of” M.U.M.R.A.: I’d rather eat shit than drink blood.... (S1X-T3N:Lazy Edit 4 di Sqwa-King) attack! Or, XXXO minus-zero remodel dubplate GFR009 “DIGI-SHREDDER”

1. ‘those to whom I had entrusted the letter
2. threw it away. but those I paid no attention to
3. brought it back to me.
4. thereby I learned.’

this is my space to do with what i don’t want:

we are not yet here
where we already are.
we are not yet there
where we already have been.

THAT hat!

5. i don’t even want it to be MY space.

boundless exhaustions churn through my absence of being.
or, what is the mode of my createdness?
re: Nature = void, as inexistent Substance.
the inexistence of totality as totality – secret lesson of most-modernist poetic form.
misreading is reading.
i have gone away far from the regimentations of mediocrity.
numberless distinctions presence we.
redemption of used soda cans and redemption of the used human species.
undead inhuman slum schizo-putrescence that i am
Microdialectical reversals flourish across the entire horizon of being.
an alibidinal virus
flourishes across sleeping facial pores.
inconsistencies abided by...

Satire as tragedy.
Bizarre renovation of prior texts be this.
recycling others.
replaceable origins.
telegraphics
inconstructed.
video-game landscapes reiterated infinitely.

nullisexual climate lulls acidic. ossification of scalar zooms.
polarities implode.
crackling affect of the uttermost wicked.
obdurate alaskan soccer fields.
siberian mummies leeched from those arachnid swarms.
the most venal economics of friendship rendered opaque by intense poverty.
chucked into the ocean.
empty soda cans.
port-areas. being the there where i have ever dwelled.
undermining and annihilatory prescience. google it.
swoons of the hateful lush.
contingent destinies.
epidermis alight.
letters fringed with unshed tears.
binary intensification of indifference.
tom-toms somewhat underused.

bellowing inwards the exterior out. buckwild. interthreading of the void. highway underpasses of narrative. nestling together in generic apartheid. upwelling glockenspiels.
capitalism is revolutionary enough to murder itself. absence of x is x itself. scenic melodies scraped from the frame. satanic objectivity of the named self be gloried in. as also all deathly artifices of annihilation. radical subjective independence of the self-mastered. goat skulls pranced about with.

5.a.
poetry requires nothing from poetics.
poetics is a repeated cut-out of a cutting-out of a poem.
one only dissects its innards with greater precision.

i tire of the waves,
their phasings and lappings and soarings and hissings.
where is the end of the waves?
where is the end of this incessant revolution of all things?
true revolution being the end of all revolution;
which never was, has never ceased to be, and never will be.
(class resentment as paranoia,
self-wounding, self-alienating, self-negating hate-faith in the other who resembles god.)
capitalism is itself the end of its history,
itself the pivot upon which it turns itself out of existence.
no need to get outside it.
only to let it go further.
we can do no other.
we do no other.
even when we resist we but reify commodities of resistance.

the sap in my marrow guttermoans now.

'poetic form is the innocence of the grandiose.'

weirding the uncanny into unknowledge of affects. 
many thinkers act as if many other thinkers never existed.
i retroact myself as the ape, nest of spiders,  archaeobacterial bloomings, as the secret to their being.
excess of access, of accessories.
differentiate identity >–< identify difference....
to neither avow nor hide in neither revelation nor dissimulation, but to act.
the having of being makes of us a mere waste-thing – see: criteria of civilization its gutters.

she shits alone, waiting for suggestions...

the subjective singularity of the first mathematical sequence of thought.
–an inauthenticity of jargon then?
‘an ontological deregulation of all the categories of humanism’
if mathematics inscribes being...
juxtaposed sheafs of concised ideologemes.

what must be said about what is,
not what is permissible to be said about what we think there is.

yes.
true orders: 
infinities of our atheism.
in between the middling and the edges.
success is not the criteria of practical truth.
immortality is only punctuated by our deaths.
dense lustre devoid of aura.
we are as axioms, never to be defined.

6. i remember little gnarled pines populating themselves out along the southern coast of Maine.

fear of reprisals becomes for me a goad to push onwards.
the proper as an object of literary criticism. proper here resounding on all its registers.
concretion assumes an abstract hovering near about it.
as i write for the self, i paper over a gaping abyss.
as i write from the body, i gut an ambiguity of infinite scalars.
to excite and augment mine multiple neighborhoods.

method is the memorial accretion of sexual consequences in the mnemotechnical strata.

erasure as origin.
an a posteriori operation generates the a priori condition of its operation.

more like a wierd grafting together of local representations.
decadence is also fecundity.
 we course with threadings of the massive. the massive itself being the face of the axiom.
culled from the excrescences between signatured properties, it is in the absences from the text that the future lies. read this therefore as signifying everything that it is not.

i am the ill philosopher.
wierd, because wierding.
doomed to an intermediacy between things.
grey hippopotai staple my skull
that slumbers with a lush heat. 

OH-SO SECRET MERZ-ENDING:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHF6JvE7RPE

–zoophorous merzbears minazo
merzbuta rattus rattus
fantail sha mo 3000
tamago offering scsi duck
ikebukuro timehunter
frog + animal magnetism
a day of seals and the devil makes three
reptile side/ insect side – (rock dream) pinkream
electric dress walrus groon
sun baked snow cave merzdub v
frog remixed and revisited live at CBGB’s
rondo/ 7phases/ blowback
bread and meat variations! 

Maxwell Clark, in addition to being a poet, is a musician working under the moniker of “Smojphace” (see: http://soundcloud.com/smojphace).

Editorial Note: (Please Read Closely Before Submitting)

To submit to Poets’ Basement, send an e-mail to CounterPunch’s poetry editor, Marc Beaudin at counterpunchpoetry@gmail.com with your name, the titles being submitted, and your website url or e-mail address (if you’d like this to appear with your work). Also indicate whether or not your poems have been previously published and where. Attach up to 5 poems and a short bio, written in 3rd person, as a single Word Document (.doc or .rtf attachments only; no .docx). Expect a response within one month (occasionally longer during periods of heavy submissions).

Poems accepted for online publication will be considered for possible inclusion of an upcoming print anthology. Please submit your poetry by Tuesday in order to be considered for the CounterPunch Weekend Edition of the Poets’ Basement. The Weekend Edition will now run on Fridays instead of Saturdays.

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