Like a sad suck. Like a purple gut. Like a tree whimpering. Like a road covered in leaves. Like the process to warble. A screech in the dissing. There are cars parked in the driveway. Like a wool cap of white-grey. We measure our accomplishments here. Like dead earth. Like rotting, dead earth. You measure your accomplishments. I grow furious at this game. I grow tired at this game. I grow two limbs that speak in signed language. Assigned language is like the wind ruffling all the needles branched and webbed. The roads were long last night. The roads were like cell blocks. I grew paranoid last night. Marijuana fumes incorporated. Sebago Brewing Co. had $4.00 whiskey drinks. Featuring Bushmills. I was with Casey and Ben. Ben is now an engineer. Yesterday afternoon I took Kevin and we drove through Augusta. Augusta is like a police barricade. Or a trench cover. Hallowell was still Hallowell. A cute, crimped one-drag dream. Like something out of the 30s. Like a phone ringing. I saw my stepfather watch me from inside the house. His shadowed wheelchair-bound body watching me. Like a phone ringing in vibration in my pocket. He watched me waiting to tell me more. He was always a commander. I always grew frustrated. Duckfat does not accomodate wheelchairs. We are leaving in a half hour. There are two blond women my age or under in my neighborhood who I grew up with who both have children now, who both have children and zero men. Where did the men go? Like shooting crows instead of hawks. Casey told me about a hen she found on her farm. Like being fucked by 13 guys. Like slaughtering 11 men. Should have been shipped out. Should have been silenced. Like silencing a hen. Like my mother sending me a pound of oregono. There is no goodness in the police. You will be searched. Like a hound with guilt you will be searched. My stepfather hands me a “c-note.” Emergency funds. Like emergencies we live our lives on the edge. I live my backside on this couch. “We are getting rid of this furniture for new furniture.” Like a fear of falling down and hitting a head. Whose head did you grow up with? I think of the savage love of animals. Thirteen roosters for a single hen. Pecked. A hole in a neck. Like a sharp beak. Like a leaf blower. Worn into the fabric of the street. Worn into the routes of the coast. Rockland: stretch of natural, homely faces. People say hello on the sidewalks, mind the curbs. Rockport: nothing dignified. Remember Waldoborough? Creeley lived there. Like a ghost of culture. Like holding onto a slipping hand. We made this land on lobsters and smiles. We are fishermen here. In Camden, Maine I remember the town center looking like an elbow. I instantly wanted to leave. It reminded me of Newport, Rhode Island. Gloucester, Massachusetts. We had to get out of there. Like fleeing a place we knew too well. Now I am in Gorham, Maine. Now I am in Gorham, Maine. Now I am in Gorham, Maine. Freeport, Maine. Brunswick, Maine. Westbrook, Gray, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Bath, Whitefield. Really good pistachios for the plane. Brown leaves, golden or bronze, flying around in circles. I wonder what Stephen King’s testicles feel like. But not really. I didn’t see any roadkill this time. I didn’t see as many friends this time. There is no more room for things on the plane. Waving hands in the air. Enjoying the self. There is no more friends. I ate a lot. Ian Stuart and his girlfriend Kim. We played Apples to Apples. Joe was there being silent and we finally bonded. We were ghosts cutting portals into the air. A portal, a memory, a sinkhole, a chime. Three days in Maine. Working-class torrents. The rain poured down and I realized it would be perfect to drown here; perfect to just sink. In Thomaston; in Wiscassit. Somewhere with nobody watching, with the blessed land all around looking at you like one large pupil. The eye of a being, like a lens, like a child. Tears and watering holes. This house is aging. There are no more children here. Joycean disfunctions. My careful pre-disposed path. I have gained no skills worth knowing. My biggest talent is the ability to complain. This is what will lead me to my death. Maine has been led to its death. America is booming out its back-end. It will blow over and Maine will be the first to return to the days of Eden and primacy. Your youth; our age. Your change; our coming to blows. The chess board. Birdie, the Jack Russel. My sister Katie baking cookies, my mom getting on the computer to check her email before we go to the vegetarian Thai restaurant, the Green Elephant, in Portland.

Paul Siegell, Tara Betts, and Adam Meora read at “South” Philadelphia’s “very-own” Chapterhouse yesterday. I was involved in Adam’s reading, and enjoyed all three. Stan and Ryan, as beloved hosts as can be, have not failed to impress just yet. Same goes for the audience. You know the deal. Click the link below if you want to stream/download the recording in MP3 format. Also, zoom over to the PAPP blog to make use of the flash player if you don’t want to do anything too crazy.

Email me if you have any questions or comments.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE A FEW DOWNLOADABLE BYTES.

You could have called your

pretty language a lovely language.

Or didn’t you know?

Get me out of this town,

out of control.

More videos from the New Philadelphia Poets reading at Germ books last Sunday, the 15th.

This plate of food should have been termed a plate of foot.

I watch airplanes go by. At any one point there are seven up there, above my apartment complex.

Here’s a dark track composed by Kenny the Extremist. I’m sampled over it. Courtesy of Aleksey Froloff, the guy who did the video recording at last Sunday’s reading.

LINK

Thanks to Aleksey Froloff for his video recording of the last New Philadelphia Poets reading at GERM books. Here are two videos thus far up on the ol’ Youtube, one of Jamie Townsend, and one of myself.

From Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern by Janet Lyon.

. . . the manifesto form has much to teach us about the problems of modernity: while it may be best known as the no-nonsense genre of plain speech, the genre that shoots from the hip, it is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre that has helped to create modern public spheres. Its influence on the history of the modern West, though decisive, has been largely overlooked, perhaps precisely because its apparent rhetorical straightforwardness obscures the degree to which the form is embedded in the contradictions of political representation. On the one hand, the manifesto as we know it from the French Revolution forward is the liberatory genre the narrates in no uncertain terms the incongruous experiences of modernity of those whose needs have been ignored or excluded in a putatively democratic political culture. On the other hand, the manifesto is the genre not of universal liberation but of rigid hierarchical binaries . . . the manifesto participates ina reduced understanding of heterogenous social fields, creating audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity, parceling out political identities across a polarized discursive field, claiming for “us” the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and constructing “them” as ideological tyrants, bankrupt usurpers, or corrupt fools. (3)

. . . the manifesto as a genre is constitutive of the public sphere to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within modern political life. For while modernity offers ideological assurances of autonomy and individualism within collectivity, it also and at the same time draws on the degferral of those promises. The manifesto records just this breach between modernity’s promissory notes and their payment. In order to understand how the manifesto has kept the records of modernity for the past three centuries, therefore, we must first reopen the historical record of democratic universalism in the west. (8)

The reading at Germ Books last night turned out a success. The order of the New Philadelphia Poets: Sarah Heady, Marion Bell, Jamie Townsend, Debrah Morkun, Carlos Soto Roman, and myself. Then Dmitry Golynko read from 2008’s As It Turned Out. There were some collaborations with Jamie, and then a great open mic featuring quite a diverse group. Oh, and the evening was recorded in three ways. 1) my audio recorder; 2) Carlos’s audio recorder; and 3) video via this guy Alex. Keep a lookout for the vidz, but for now, check out my recordings, which are free to download if you want to. Thanks to everyone who made it to the event.

Click here to download the reading in mp3 format.

I’m still trying to figure out why I can’t embed a flash player onto this page, but it just won’t work. So no flashiness. Nothing. Just old school text links.