Poets & Writers has run a News and Trends piece titled "Video Thrilled the Poetry Stars" on video poems by Alex Dimitrov for their National Poetry Month Mar/Apr issue. It features Anne Carson, and Thylias Moss as well as some of the efforts my friends K. Erik Ino and Jeffrey Schell have made of my work. It mentions the mtvU poetry commercials they ran of John Ashbery who was discussed by poet-critic David Orr this past Sunday in the NYTBR.

WORK SITE

For all the nameless,
Heartfelt expansions,
This quiet boy grows,
Watching the noisy
Village people grow.
Listening to the fancy
Barking of its elders,
He is terribly moved

By all he is lacking
And hides what he
Is lacking and more.
Unlike other, capable
Boys who can relate
To an already existing
Order of this world,
He is, forever, existing

In the same place—
And everywhere else.
"Time," he says, "I
Experience you
And become extinct."
And while he turns
Out to be nothing,
This was a time when

All of time collapsed
And remained with
His illusion, which
Stands in the center
With the carpenter
Hanging from the
Rafters, his unfinished
Sandwich on wax paper.


SIDE SHOW AND TELL

Three of us sat down at a table
With a redhead and a brunette.
Nothing was being said. Patrick,
Being Patrick, let them know
I have four toes on each foot.
After a silence the redhead said,
"And I have one leg"—as if we
Were pulling it. So I pulled off
My boots and socks and said,
"See?" to prove it. What felt
Soon, must have been later:
The brunette was upset and left.
And Patrick and what's-his-name
Went their separate ways, alone.
Dancing by the pool table with
A plaid skirt on, the redhead,
Whose name starts with an E,
Wanted me to go home with her.
She leaned into me and said
"You couldn't write anything more
Stupid than this, you know?" "Yes,"
Was everything I could say, but I was
Thinking I love her with all my heart.
Back at her studio I got undressed
And freaked out by her collection
Of antique robots from the Fifties,
But she was on her bed on the floor
Peeling off her panty hose and I
Poured us each a glass of water.
I walked one over to her as she took
Off her left leg and leaned it against
The radiator until morning.


RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Captured and pressed and helped
Out of being an apple on a branch,
Slowly the browning juice is put to use
One way—producing multiple effects,
Each more incomprehensible than
The next—unless, from a low airplane
At night, I could watch the thousands
Of channels that are being flashed
Through on televisions with remote
Controls. Then there would be nothing
For me to do but understand that was
A trick my mind was playing on the fact:
That clouds were obstructing the light,
Briefly, from houses on the ground.
And then making paper out of apples
For a living feels reasonable all over
Again, and for no reason whatsoever.


PLYWOOD PTERODACTYLS

The men with wombs sat down at the bar.
Staring at their long faces in the long mirror,
The world was far away and far more than
Twice of what they saw. Fear, yes, ripped
The doors and the doors of their hearts,
Yes, back and forth. Dust curled in the dirt
Of Main Street whose pavement had been
Exported ago, but there was still whiskey
And still more whiskey. Gravity is a lie.
Light is the base hallucination. They dance
For each other and do not know why
And do not care, but do think they do.
Baby St. Jude struts in to show off Scoops—
His stuffed pelican with plastic vampire teeth—
And calls it a swan. We put down our drinks
To praise his advance in weaponizing emotion.

AARON FAGAN
Milk, Vol. 8

WITH SOMEONE ELSE'S TELEPHONE

Gathering information and groceries
In the morning--before the full pitch
Of afternoon and its distractions--
Let's say I was--for the first time--
Struck with my innate love for you.
And each shopping day after that,
I have experienced the full pitch
Of my innate love for you, just
Before noon, when you are gone.
Gone--for practical purposes, just
Shy of healthy--in the sense of
Forever, once I get the headline--
From the day after the last time
I went shopping--out of my mind,
About a person in the Safeway
Parking lot who was arrested,
Reciting lines from Paradiso,
Naked, in Italian, and full pitch
For the sun and other stars to hear
The darkest light of love revealed.

AARON FAGAN

The Yale Review April 2007

GYM

There is safety around the smell of coffee and laughter.
And a story so simply told it sounds like our story—
Like your life, a lie you made up as you went along—
Until it stopped working, and then you are the hair
Arrested in the shower and won't wash down the wall.
And it's puzzling in the purest sense of puzzling to you—
Inspiration comes in with a dusty tool bag and leaves.
And you wear that "What the fuck?" expression you have
Every time you experience an aspect of relativity like this.
Everything and nothing infinitely like something and never
Left to be what it is or would become begins to sound
Like math for peace—if you just took an involuntary breath
Of hope and surrendered even more to what happens next
And everything you can't imagine after that, with love.
And that is when we doubt and say you'd have to be dead
Or free. The storyteller tells us only our idea of who
We are is dead. And that we are all our own religion.

AARON FAGAN

The American Poetry Review May/June 2008

LIKE IT IS

"Take: this is my body."
Mark 14:22

Life unfolds sideways like a sentence.
Life unfolds sideways like a sentence.
Our love is constantly changing.
Our love is constantly changing.
Is a life-sentence constantly sideways
Like love unfolds our changing?

Better yet, pass the bread, my dear.
Better yet, pass the bread, my dear.
It is late and you never look too tired.
It is late and you never look too tired.
The late bread. It is tired too, dear, yet
You pass . . . and, my, never look better.

What is another word for paradelle,
What is another word for paradelle,
When it sounds like a lesser parade?
When it sounds like a lesser parade?
Parade another paradelle for when it
Sounds like what a word "lesser" is!

A paradelle constantly unfolds
A lesser changing: Life.
You parade the password sideways.
What sentence too sounds better late
Like our bread is when it is tired and, yet,
Like it is . . . never look for another love, my dear.

AARON FAGAN


The Paradelle (Red Hen Press, 2005)

COME AND GET IT

You could care less, I could care less. So
We have something in common. Walk down
This moderately metaphorical hall with me.

I want to show you something disgusting.
(I feel like I already have, but fine, we will
Have it your way.) How does a dead cat

Sound to you? A dead cat filled with maggots?
And one eye that looks aware of your presence
Despite the conventional impossibility of that?

Life should feel ridiculously full of hope again
For no small unwarranted reason. Perhaps
You should consider breaking a law today.

I’m just throwing that out there as a possibility.
That hall was in a dungeon, in case you wondered.
The apple, on the table, at the end, is for you.

AARON FAGAN

5AM (Spring 2006)

LOONEY TUNES

In this one
A crow is busy
Being a crow
Eating ears of corn
Like a typewriter
Before deadline.
The farmer,
Outraged,
Rounds his shotgun
While wild chases
Ensue.
Radical plans
Backfire
Like his gun
With the crow’s finger
In the barrel.

The crow toys
With the old man
All day long
Leaving him lost
In the maze of his corn.
In the distance
Perhaps he, too, can see
As the sun fades
It’s turned into a speaker?
And hear
(Despite his madness)
A stuttering pig
Smash through
In the end
And announce
That "th-that’s all" there is?

AARON FAGAN

Boulevard (Spring 2002)

MONOPOLY, TOLEDO

Trees are like people—it’s not like you can just walk up to them and expect to get along.
Josh Leopold

I met Dave at Zebra Lounge in Chicago.
His friend, Brian, was a ghost.
He preferred the word "haunting."

He asked me, “What’s on your mind?”
He wanted to know if I “feel like I have.”
I feel possessed to write "insignificance."

Blank-faced with what’s left of the future
He said, “Genetically we have a clean slate.”
He said, “I want you to read something.”

Leather notebook, a gratitude journal:
Write a story . . . “What’s on your mind?”
“Do you mean right this second?” I asked.

“I am trying to finish my book of poems.
They will make a movie out of it someday.
A system will be developed to live in text.

We will stare out and place impressions.”
“Don’t tell anyone you could make a million.”
He is doing a painting: Thoughts For A Dollar—

He has a patent number for each one to sell.
He was upset I had heard this before.
“See . . . fucker’s are already ripping me off!”

I could have mistaken what he meant.
One is rich with insights about masturbation,
But women drag the men by their hair in this one.

I said, “I feel like we’re being watched.”
Downtown a building was "The Fountainhead."
I am listening to "Waking and Discovering."

Write a story . . . “What’s on your mind?”
“Do you mean right this second?” I asked.
“This whole conversation should be a movie.”

Brian makes art. Dave likes art. Dave buys art.
Brian could tell I hadn’t really read Rilke’s Letters.
It is with some trepidation that I move forward.

Brian being Brian, questions the theory of light.
Genetically we have a clean slate.
He said, “I want you to read something.”

Leather notebook, a gratitude journal:
Every drink’s a dollar. Your ninth beer’s free.
I was looking at the nicotine . . .

Stained photos of the owner . . .
Playing piano in a wig.
James put his hand on me.

Is $75 enough to leave my wife?
Would Greece help if Canada
Went to war with Mexico?

My beer was empty
And I had nothing to say.
Who knows what to say?

He told us to “Go home and study”
Because “our shoes were all wrong!”
The barmaid yelled at James.

James Joyce got up and shook.
He made his way to the door.
All the signs of his life were there.

Benét says Jasper Johns’ work
“Is his attempts at viewing
Familiar objects with a fresh vision.”

Benét says James Joyce’s work
“Was known for its revolutionary
Innovations in the art of the novel.”

His books were “denounced as obscure,
Unintelligible, nonsensical, and obscene.”
This is the comodification of grief.

"I will try to express myself in some mode
Of life or art as freely as I can, using for my
Defense the only arms I allow myself to use

—Silence, exile, and cunning . . .
I will not serve that in which
I no longer believe." Living is

Teaching languages and doing clerical work.
“I am trying to finish my book of poems.”
"Insignificance" is on my mind again.

Write a story . . . 3 gratitudes for what
Makes sense of our past, brings peace
For today, and creates vision for tomorrow.

I said, “I feel like we’re being watched.”
“They will make a movie out of it someday.”
“Don’t tell anyone you could make a million.”

“This whole conversation should be a movie.”
He said, “I want you to read something.”
I feel possessed to write "insignificance"—

If, genetically, we have a clean slate
Then let Love design us a wonderful
New blueprint for the future.

Brian is doing a painting: Thoughts For A Dollar.
He has a patent number for each one to sell.
He said, “I want you to read something.”

His books were “denounced as obscure,
Unintelligible, nonsensical, and obscene.”
Painting “familiar objects with a fresh vision.”

Brian said, “Don’t laugh Toledo
Is an amazing place.” Downtown
A building was "The Fountainhead."

"—Silence, exile, and cunning . . ."
An architect of enormous conceit
Must justify his faith in the permanent

Values of honest design in four senses:
1) historical or literal 2) allegorical
3) moral 4) anagogical.

James Joyce still stares out of his impression—
"As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring waste of souls."

AARON FAGAN

Another Chicago Magazine (Spring 2004)
#43 Music & Sound Issue

RESISTENTIALISM

I was sitting in a field. It was a great field.
One I was surely not the first to write about.
The thought so many thoughts had been
Drafted in the company of its expanses was
Putting me on the edge of its openness, and had
Become so crowded with sentimentality, that
Ghost lines, of those who came before me,
Took over as if they were in the wind carrying
Only the particularly bad ideas ever expressed
There—right to the spot I was sitting like a
Whispering pollen giving hay-fever to my
Imagination—I couldn’t breathe when they bound
Together like troops repositioning for a final sweep:
"Plush" was a musket at my temple, my eyes dilated
In the face of the dark cannon barrel "green" and
"Grass" was striking a deadly match.

AARON FAGAN

Salt (Australia—v.15—2002)
An ABC of Theory & Praxis

THE FUNERAL DINNER

"It is enough to tell of the books we’ve read and our biography is done."
Osip Mandelstam

On the title page of Rose Hecht’s copy
Of "A Child of the Century" you can see
She kissed her husband’s name beneath
The inscription: To Rose for whose heart
And out of whose spirit this book was written
By her grateful lover, Ben

Rose, who after his death went through
Each book in his vast library, documenting
The mind of the man she loved in life,
Taping in extra pages where his opinions
Required more than simply highlighting
“Benny’s favorite line” in "A Hero of Our Time."

In a dog-eared copy of "The Brothers K"
She got to page one hundred and
Stopped writing. You’d think reading too
Unless you turn to the last page, some
Five hundred later, where two words seem
To be enough to follow the closing passage:

“Well, now we will finish talking
And go to his funeral dinner.
Don’t be disturbed at our eating pancakes-
It’s a very old custom and there is something
Nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well,
Let us go! And now we go hand in hand.”

And it is as though she disappeared
Into what her hand guided her to say,
Right then, into the book itself,
And became the words: me too.

AARON FAGAN

TriQuarterly (Summer 2002)

GROUT

Rebuilding a family’s master
Shower I heard a mother tell
Her boy, “Grandma doesn’t
Need a present this year
Because she’s dead, honey.
And to that he gave a confused
“O.K.?” echoing square, level,
Plumb, and true to the small stall
I was standing in, with grout on
My trowel, filling in the gaps,
Deep between the muttering tiles,
Repeating "terrible, just terrible."

AARON FAGAN

Living Forge (Spring 2005)

DRASTIC MEASURES

Each morning I set my lathe’s counter to zero.
For each part I make, I imagine a year. Moving
Forward or backward from the birth of Christ,
History helps pass the time. As I go, I do my best
Not to think in the small increments that make
These parts possible. I can’t be 'a hair off' as I slide
Out into the years where man doesn’t exist
In either direction. It all goes back to tiny again.
I was dead a thousand parts ago. It’s lunchtime,
And I can’t remember if I had children with a woman
I love. "There’s no feeling more accurate than grief,"
I scream, but the machine is loud and I don’t know
If I’ve said it. When the little ones came, which one
Had hair approximately the same size and color as mine?

AARON FAGAN

Living Forge (Spring 2005)

DEUS EX MACHINA

I saw a boy today wearing
A baby blue golf shirt with
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Embroidered on its breast.

I kept on walking with what
I imagine the shirt feels like
Running through my mind
Like the machine that made it.

AARON FAGAN

Living Forge (Spring 2005)

DOING MY PART FOR THE TOOL AND DIE INDUSTRY

On the floor you wouldn’t have found us
Lost in discussion over math’s miracle
Beautifully locked in precision parts. No.
We put a living together on machines—
And feeling as nameless as our parts to a
Whole we’d never see did pass with time.
On the hour we measured to maintain
Micro-metric tolerances opposite those
That, off in the corners of our particular
Hells, we kept as high as ourselves and
Hidden in the poisons we picked to get
Through the day. Off by the sander in
Tank-top and short-shorts, the boss’s
Model-hot daughter would saunter by—
Showing off the fine line of her ass for all;
And off the line, we traded fantasies,
Drugs, and ways to fuck with her at a bar
Where we cheated on everything the way
We did at the shop, where we saw Bill
With brain cancer fading in, dying out—
And I began to run his part one day: on
Lathe, punch-press, and broach I inhaled
Exhaust, kept true to a scale, in part,
And it doesn’t spare me to say this.

AARON FAGAN

Living Forge (Spring 2005)

THE SOURCE

Our moon has done its part
And it will do its part again tonight
Reflecting light that will illuminate
Our sleep from a source that truly is
On the other side. In this light
It’s no wonder that we lie here
Like cattle crowded by the bent visions
Of our dreams. We’re better off if the sun
Is the eye of God and not the whole of God—
A single vision that sees everything
And nothing as the same thing.
No two ways of looking at it.
No other version of the self
Going around seeing the future
As a perforated edge along the stars
That can be torn away at any moment
While losing sight of the fact that stars
Burn from their own resources.
Tonight we read from them the story
Of our own light burning—
How the distance it travels is our distance.

AARON FAGAN

Stand (U.K.—June 2002)

IN VINO VERITAS

I dipped my finger into the wine
Placed it on the crystal rim
And with just the right lack
Of pressure I gently followed
The thin resonant line
Pointing of the heart of the thing
With no decipherable center.

AARON FAGAN

Shenandoah (Summer/Fall 2001)

LOVE

Say it's a form of heat that doesn't rise
But passes from one body to the next.
Say it flows through you and then out
And back in again like a ghostly thread
Weaving a basic pattern inside of you
That will slowly begin to take the shape
Of what you'll think you can describe.

AARON FAGAN

The Yale Review (July 2002)