[I can’t even say punk was important, even as it happened,]
I can’t say punk was important, even as it happened, I mean, at least where we lived, it was mostly rich kids who went to the shows, who could afford to buy the clothes, who didn’t have to work and bought all those stupid buttons at Zipperhead. Then of course by the time punk got to us, it was ruined, it was over, and we were posers, we weren’t there at the beginning and we weren’t there at the end. Jersey kids like me mopped floors or washed cars, saw the beautiful girls in sundresses and boots and thought they had awful taste in boys who dressed up like they were janitors or rode motorbikes, but took the same commuter trains we did to The Crypt or piled in their daddy’s car to City Gardens or whichever shithole we found ourselves in, and years later all the nights watching jocks lock arms and pile on each other, or the sensitive ones who blamed society and turned into sad sad skinheads. It’s hard to point to what broke the spell, if punk ever put us under a spell in the first place, while we hung out at the bar, listening to the music.
Nobody gets credit for that.
Nobody writes an oral history of the posers, even when everyone sells out.
Hello, Dolly
Back in the late 90s, when I lived in Williamsburg, doing my part to gentrify a block filled with Polish gangsters, I found a phone jack in the kitchen. I thought it was an extension of our line, but when I plugged in a phone I heard people speaking Spanish. My first thought: FREE PHONE CALLS! Whenever my roommate went to work, I called 1-900 sex lines, sat on the floor between the oven and the sink, and talked dirty to this lady who sounded exactly like Carol Channing. She told me that she had a really great body. “Have you ever heard of Pamela Anderson?” she asked me. I said of course I had, but I couldn’t shake from my mind how she sounded so much like Carol Channing. The last time we talked, someone else picked up the phone, like my sister did back in high school, except this lady screamed something in Spanish.
I worked so hard to concentrate, to think Baywatch thoughts and not Hello, Dolly thoughts, to keep my lizard brain together in my underwear, next to the oven, my roommate taking his sweet time to come upstairs.
On the Meeting of Frank O’Hara and David Lee Roth
after Philip Levine
Greenwich Village, 1961. Of course Frank’s loaded, and has no clue this seven-year-old will grow up to be the lead singer of Van Halen. Manny Roth welcomes his nephew to Café Wha? He sets him on a stool. A steel drummer sings calypso. David Lee bumps into Frank, who stumbles in from the San Remo after hours of gossiping with abstract expressionists.
No one is of their right mind. Folk singers haggle with Manny over stage time. David joins the hootenanny, sings along. His uncle tells him don’t be humble, kid—you’re not that good.
No poem will come from this chance meeting on MacDougal Street, if it ever did. But have you ever discovered that two giants walked the same exact block, on the same day in New York City, and wondered if the world changed? That, if something like that can happen, God really does exist? That, if something like that can happen, it explains why myths always win in the end?
To review: in 1961, the future lead singer of Van Halen and son of a doctor in Beverly Hills visits his Uncle Manny Roth and has his first taste of the stage. Also in 1961, three years before he dies, a poet drinks in that same neighborhood. Did they really meet? Did Frank ever step inside a folk bar, maybe to attend to his boredom? Frank will still collapse on Fire Island. The future Diamond Dave will kick his legs up and sing about ice cream men. He will act like he has forgotten the words to his own songs, and how the only people who put iced tea in their whiskey bottles is The Clash.
I don’t want to make this any more than it is. But I can’t help myself. I also don’t want to cover this story with more earth and grass and prose, and hide what this is really about, which is how I wished for the meeting of these two humans, both too wild for their imaginations, and yet cannot shake this idea of how I might die without having written at least one perfect poem about a city that defeated me over the course of twelve years, and yet could withstand this pair of lunatics without even capturing one biographer’s imagination, even as a footnote.
All I’ve ever done is sing along.
Debate Outside Four-Faced Liar, 2003
What about sense of play this poet keeps asking me // I guess to pique or troll me about what makes good poetry // what about sense of play over and over again in clipped confident chirps // and I am out on the sidewalk bumming smokes on west 4th where a poet-friend tends bar // what about sense of play over and over // and I swear I was minding my own business // what about sense of play and the poet from new hampshire in a puffed-up pirate shirt won’t pipe down // and I pretend not to hear another what about sense of play // and finally say listen I am just here to see my friends read poems // but the truth is I couldn’t care less about sense of play or fancy or imagination // the truth is I played dumb // and as the subject switched to getting letters of rec for grad school I said
Of course in front of the dildo shop next door.
You’re right, and slipped away into the bar.
This is Not a List Poem
it’s not a solo it’s a motif, / it’s not an outro it’s an ending / it’s not getting you to think it’s drowning in an ocean / it’s not a great moment it’s a double tracked fiasco / it’s not live it’s Memorex/ it’s not pushed further it’s where it needs to be / it’s not one of the secrets it’s cobbled together/ it’s not a jump suit it’s a crotch cover / / it’s not one of my asshole friends it’s The King of Pop calling you / it’s not Becky it’s unique it’s not unique it’s Becky / it’s not a German TV soundstage audience circa 1971 it’s the primal simplicity of our own desires / it’s not smoke on the water it’s I’ve got big balls / it’s not Frankenstein it’s the doctor’s creation / it’s not doesn’t get you straight away it’s a bit of a laugh / it’s not fancy it’s just transparent / it’s not peep-toe sandals it’s testosterone au go go / it’s not freedom from choice it’s just a bit of reverb // it’s not a doggie’s dinner it’s make it red and trace your hopes into the ground / it’s not paring down it’s finding what you’re left with / it’s not a riff it’s finding new ways to mechanically distort / it’s not a pregnant pause it’s a Rickenbacker / it’s not phrase it’s a variation / it’s not retrograde it’s unusual motion / it’s not a list poem it’s a prayer
