As/Is







3.17.2024


Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Riot Grrrl on P.F.S. Post


Riot Grrrl, double sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post.

Riot Grrrl is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.









3.10.2024


Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Undulant on P.F.S. Post


Undulant, sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post

Undulant is available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound









3.03.2024


Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The Studio on Argotist Online Poetry


From the Aughts Philly mid-section of Something Solid, the double sonnet The Studio is now up on Argotist Online Poetry. Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.

The Studio is also available as an individual mp3 page on PennSound









10.25.2023


Chimes: 2024 edition









8.29.2023


PICC on P.F.S. Post 2


 PICC (A Poet in Center City) #34 on P.F.S. Post.









8.26.2023


PICC (A Poet in Center City) on Fieled's Miscellaneous


 More from PICC (A Poet in Center City) on Fieled's Miscellaneous: #14 and #62 and #16 and #2.









8.14.2023


PICC (A Poet in Center City) on P.F.S. Post


 From PICC (A Poet in Center City) on P.F.S. Post: #s 18 and 44









8.04.2023


Equations #45


 

Growing up with Emma, who had been in my class at CHS, wasn’t like growing up with Roberta. It wasn’t like anything. Emma, a lanky blonde with long, lank blonde hair, a chiseled, cat-like face, and long limbs, looked like a stunt double for Trish, and had been merely an acquaintance. She was quiet, and kept to herself. Her friends were among the geeks of the class. Why and how Emma knew to show up now, in the midst of all this turbulence with Trish, I have no idea, but she did. I laughed because she so resembled Trish, but I was also aroused. I liked the idea, past N and Roberta, of a real hook-up within my class, even ten years after the fact. She was there, at the Last Drop, on a succession of key summer days, in a sleeveless white blouse. After all these years, her cat-face grew on me as enchanting, compelling, suggestive of something her whole presence insinuated— she identified heavily with Trish, and had a female impulse to demarcate turf which could also be hers. Whether she’d been stalking us or just heard what was happening with us from the suburbs, I still don’t know. I knew she was commuting to Center City from somewhere. What she wanted was just one night with me, I later concluded. When, on the one late afternoon I made my way with her back to Logan Square, we were ensconced, she took out a bottle of Robitussin as though it were an aperitif, and she were Trixie Belle. She wanted, as she said, a Robo-trip. It was part of the magic of that night that Emma wound up encapsulating for me so many different partners at once, including partners merely being anticipated. I found it easy to begin making love to her, because she made it easy. Her equation was interesting, about female levels of awareness— everything about her physiology screamed, you always wanted me the most, but you just didn’t know it. You’re a man— you don’t know these things. I have delivered myself to you because you need me now, and I need you. Now you may begin to learn who you are. And we made love with great fluidity and rapidity, and then we made love again. Her fluidity was like Heather’s would be, and the sense of being lulled into a trance of perpetual, high-intensity intercourse, on the bed, then on the living room floor, on the couch in the living room, from the front, from the back, was like Jena. We each gave the other a show-stopping performance, manifesting (as was odd, and as I was not too dumb and callow to notice) an inversion of our years of starving for each other. The absolute ecstasy of several mutual orgasms was the tactile insignia, as it might’ve been with Roberta and N, of an eternity of denial overcome. This, even as what was built into us both had been noticed only by her. Why, in sex equations, women usually hold the cards: women are receptive to sensory data on a deeper level than men, and have a primordial understanding of physiology, of bodies and more bodies, which men do not. When bodies speak, women listen more. Emma and I shared a home, but only she registered what our bodies shared, what was in them. When Trish showed up, it was a red flag from nature that it would be Emma’s time to show up too. Even if it proved to be the cosmic design that after one night, I would never see Emma again.

 









8.01.2023


Equations #25 in Argotist Online Poetry


 Equations #25 in Argotist Online Poetry. Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.









7.30.2023


Equations on perma.cc


 Equations: The Thesis Episodes on perma.cc.

Equations: The Jade Episodes on perma.cc. Peace out.









6.30.2023


Equations #39

 

That first spring I spent in State College, Hope swept hopelessly away from my friends and I as a siren. With her pitch black hair, dark eye make-up, Cure shirts, she embodied the mystery of the Gothic, which was a countercultural subtext in the Nineties about outsider-ism, what it meant to subsist as a freak in the world. I didn’t know what she would be like up close— as of August, and the fall semester starting, the dimensional angle hit me as hard as Hope did, who was not taking no for an answer, with any of us. The attitude, once you gained access to her room, was as pure Don Juana as it could be. When she, frankly, pulled off her panties and offered me her crotch, the heat of it made me swoon, so that I could only half-function. She was too bold, too blunt. All of her was fiercely dark, and the fade into her was to cleave to the darkness. Yet, the tactile thing, about lovemaking and sex and the right kinds of delicacy and the right blend or savior faire towards mixing seductiveness, aggression, and restraint, was beyond her. Hope wanted sex to manifest as a Gothic ideal, a stand taken for burrowing into each other’s permanent, corrosive darkness. What two bodies are actually supposed to do to make sex a something pleasurable, was not a relevant reality, when all that black eyeliner spoke more. All of which meant that sex here fell down, past her sharp jaw-line, bulging eyes, and exotically wrought face, into a way of demonstrating rebellion, obstinacy against the normative, but also awkwardness between two bodies hardening and softening in and out of harmony with each other, with their own nudity, and with an attitude too militant, too fierce. I learned that, movies and other cultural talisman objects aside, real sex requires real tenderness, for men as well as women, and when tenderness goes missing, so, generally, does ecstasy.









6.20.2023


Equations: The Thesis Episodes on PennSound


Equations: The Thesis Episodes on PennSound. Many thanks to the PennSound crew.

P.S. The Jade Episodes, also on PennSound, completes the book. Cheers. 








6.14.2023


Equations #37 in Otoliths (70)


 Equations #37, from the 2023 edition of Equations, in Otoliths 70. Many thanks to Mark Young.

Here is Otoliths 70 in its entirety. And in print.








6.03.2023


New Poem in Otoliths (69)

 

 


 Cabinet, the concluding double sonnet in the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, in Otoliths 69. Many thanks to Mark Young. 

Here is Otoliths 69 in its entirety. And in print.






Equations #26 in Argotist Online Poetry

 


 Equations #26, one added to the book in 2023, in Argotist Online Poetry. Thanks to Jeff Side. 









5.12.2023


Letters to Dead Masters




A new way to read the epistolary novella.