i’ve lived 6 months in this town
i’m half-baked right now
putting back items on the shelf
i don’t want or need – like 2 for 1 sunflower seeds
and that package of moist Betty Crocker brownies.

the invisible contract gave me more
time and money to spend in the purple zone
the land of soymilk and iPhonies.
(take a pic of my savage breast
you Hipstamatic closet racist!)

the anger boils in an unwatched pot
i forgot on the stove
in banal haste to not waste my time.
i walk with reusuable shopping bags
up and down the aisles of inconvenience.

not a care in the world,
the clerk in the backroom smokes.
a joint venture looms as he kisses his girlfriend
between cigarettes and plastic sheathed porno magazines
jerk offs don’t read to jerk off…

…to the beat of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”
i walk out – shattering to think of time wasted
in a ghost town formerly sponsored by petrochemicals
and reruns of reality shows i never watched.
i lost your new phone number before the bomb.

for t.j.

Instead of careening into
a mid-life crisis I found
myself thinned out and
spiraling through a neon
pharmacy sign. You all
wished me well and I never
looked back. There were
aliens hovering over the
apartment complex and
strange men taking photos
then running away before
I could catch them, but
somehow it was all ok, I had
my words and my patchwork
soul to remind me that in
the face of terror a happy
caged monkey resides, gnawing
on a silver banana and wishing
me well forever forth.

Helicopter drops 100,000 poetry bookmarks over city as protest against war

Poetry rained from the skies on Saturday night in Berlin as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile were dropped on the city from a helicopter.

Lasting for half an hour, the initiative was intended as a protest against war and a message of peace, as well as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the independence of Chile. It was the fifth “poetry rain” project from Chilean art collective Casagrande, which has arranged previous poetry bombing events in Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Gernika (2004) and Warsaw (2009) – all cities which, like Berlin, have suffered aerial bombings during their history.

Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to “break the morale” of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing “‘builds’ a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way”.

The Berlin project, for which Casagrande worked with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin as part of the Long Night of Museums, took place in the city’s Lustgarten, where a crowd of thousands had gathered to hear readings and performances by Latin American artists.

Poems dropped from the helicopter circling the area were by poets including Ann Cotten, Karin Fellner, Nora Gomringer, Andrea Heuser, Orsolya Kalász, Björn Kuhligk, Marion Poschmann, Arne Rautenberg, Monika Rinck, Hendrik Rost, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Tom Schulz, Thien Tran, Anja Utler, Jan Wagner, Ron Winkler and Uljana Wolf, according to Lyrikline.org, one of the organisations supporting the project.

(i will save you only if your
veins are slight)

we were birdwatching between the oak trees
i saw two hawks have a fight that could happen
to us

so i backed away
and tried to run

but the frost tangled our atoms
we melted, we became
a frozen pond

and the ice skate blades didn’t hurt us.
we rented out to plankton for recipe,
they swim around the curves of our
wobbly necks
they dance in and out

they surface
in the humpbacks roars
when the moon is about

winter seeds break out on my skins
complex
i will become a doe
and i will sing to the mountain tops
about my cuteness and white spots.

this is allen ginsberg:

baby girl reaches for his face
his nose
glasses
anything

tries to stick her thumb in his mouth
a curious and favorite past-time

children everywhere
do it
                                                                    the viscuous
                                                                       pulpous
                                                                        mouth
and now:

heres one
with beard!

shes 3 yrs old

he sucks her thumb
into his mouth

and out 

and in

here is a grown up
who's into it

                                                                        unreal

Listen:
Drag branches comeback
Across the forest floor:
Knowledge of the rough¡

At water’s edge
I gather some things up:
Memory of nothing.

We’ve the time to give the Babel Tower
A close reading.
Awful good, Tú
As Roy A. Rappaport’s
Ritual… as Communication and as State.
Our preferences might be
Toward more emphasis
On species places:
Smooth textures of dead wood
Knowledge of our hands on arms
The body-art of bullshit
Drinking cocoa
And tend to the faith
With a Vampire’s short stick
That smells of infinite urine.

History reveals itself to us
In this way:
Poetry, Tales, Essays are pamphlets
Of impossible interest
Multiplying voices-human, voices-animal
Voices-plant
Voice-life of Earth
As Dan O’Neill’s
Holiday for Cynics.

Look, little one
We live this close to disaster
There is no turning back
From the tops of the trees
Which are so dense
Almost no sky is visible
Only the odor dilates the nostril
And quickens the heart
On a marijuana tortilla.
The buddhists have been tellig us
That the Self (Ego)
As we conceive of it
Is an illusion.
A good tip
Thinking about Gurney Norman’s
Jack and His Ego.

Is it?
It is that we are of a Time-Sexual
Wherein all species has been joined
To the Wo/Man
Of Homo Sapiens
And Life is a single exercise of Cannibals
In constantly elevating towers
Of Bureaucracy.
Nothing in Somethingg
Something in our Nothingness.

The book he showed off was “Shoplifting From American Apparel,” the novella by 26-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., author Tao Lin. Of course this exchange happened on the L train, which moves through the heart of hipster Brooklyn, and of course the guy was wearing Converse Chucks, skinny jeans and a tight flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked about 27.

“Shoplifting” was Lin’s fifth major published work, but with it he pushed himself closer to mainstream recognition than ever before. For years, Lin wrote for small literary magazines and online outlets like the Nervous Breakdown, NOON and 3:AM. His earlier collections of poetry and stories, published by the independent press Melville House, went generally unnoticed, though championed by bloggers here and there. In 2008, he earned some infamy when Gawker posted about his annoying promotional tactics. And finally, in January 2009, New York magazine’s book critic Sam Anderson christened Lin the “New Lit Boy,” though he nonetheless acknowledged, “It’s tempting, from a distance, to dismiss him.” As the Sept. 7 release of his new book, “Richard Yates,” approaches, Lin once again garnered Gawker headlines — and annoyed scores of commenters — thanks to his trespassing arrest at the NYU bookstore in lower Manhattan.

Through all of this, Lin’s writing, despite its shortcomings, has perfectly captured the aimless malaise of the Internet generation. It’s no wonder, then, that he has successfully used the Web to manage his career and push his name onto computer screens everywhere. His guerrilla-style online marketing has made him a Web phenomenon. But can it break him into the publishing mainstream?

What fame Lin has already achieved is a testament to his ability to master viral and unconventional publicity techniques. In July 2008, Lin sold six shares of “Richard Yates” online. The winning bidders gave him $2,000 each in exchange for 10 percent of the domestic profits that come from “Yates.” As he says with a laugh, “If it doesn’t make very much, that’s their loss.” Inevitably, Stephen Elliott’s Lin-adoring online outlet the Rumpus named “Richard Yates” the August selection for its newly launched book club, four months before the book’s publication. James Frey has endorsed “Yates,” and the New York Observer recently published a profile of Lin written in his own distinctive style.

In early November 2009, Lin held an “experimental contest” on his blog that invited users to bid a certain amount of money via Paypal — any amount they chose — on a prize package of Tao Lin goodies. The catch: Lin’s prizes would go to the highest bidder, but entrants would not get their money back if their bid lost. Lin posted a video that showed off the prizes: A “unique drawing of a Sasquatch holding a hamburger,” which he notes has the “crying hamster stamp of authenticity” (a small doodle Lin puts on all his artwork and also signs books with); a Tao Lin T-shirt; an unpublished draft of a short story; an error-filled galley copy of “Shoplifting From American Apparel”; and a small Moleskine journal filled with Lin’s notes. “You can find out exactly what I do by getting this and looking at my to-do list,” he declares in the video. One finds all of this thoroughly ridiculous until learning that the last Moleskine notebook he sold on eBay went for $80. He is making real money off of this shwag. Lin says, “I probably make $700 a month from selling stupid things on my blog.”

Beyond raising funds and buzz for his antics — and unlike the majority of successful novelists — Lin is also willing to use the Web as a tool for engaging with his readers directly. In a recent HTMLGIANT comment thread, someone under the user name “Attractive skinny girl” asked Lin for his phone number. He posted it, no hesitation. The average fiction lover can’t just shoot John Irving an e-mail, or friend request Martin Amis on Facebook. They can, however, contact Tao Lin quite easily, and in most cases he’ll respond.

And then there’s Lin’s writing, which aims to capture the aimlessness and tedium of today’s Web-obsessed 20-somethings:

Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.

This is the opening passage of “Shoplifting From American Apparel.” To many, the style is stark, lifeless and lazy. But not to Lin’s fans. “I like the dreamlike quality,” says Jim Whitten, a teacher from Connecticut. “There are no real transitions. I like how minimal it is.” Sayid Edwards, a recent Wesleyan graduate, chimes in: “It’s like, have you ever been in a conversation with someone who doesn’t say very much? And you’re intrigued by it, but you’re also kind of annoyed.” High praise, indeed.

Article by Daniel B. Roberts who is a newspaper reporter and pop culture blogger. He works in the Bronx and lives in Manhattan. You can find him on Twitter. Read the full article @ Salon.com. Photo by Carrie Battan

laughed and

bit my fingernails until
my teeth ached – because

were you aware
sir
were you aware
ma’am

that this right
here lasts forever

that’s right longer than
high school and
that cast on your arm when it was broken in football and
how your dad yells but didn’t mean to and
the middle of the night age 7,8,9, crying in the kitchen to wake mom

up

whoever up, pretending it was
because of the dark

What could Julia do? Bernard had been the love of her life, her every breath, her heartbeat, her sweat, her longing, her anger, her everything. She felt lost when she woke in the morning to find his side of the bed empty and cold. At first she imagined Bernard at the corner market buying fresh oranges and strawberries and maybe smelling the flowers before paying Carlos with not only money, but also with the kindness of his smile.

When he did not come back after this thought, Julia had to concoct another to excuse his absence. Maybe he went to the record store down the street, she thought to herself, he was just talking about finding that Miles Davis record from a festival in 1969. She imagined Bernard cradling the produce under his arm gently while he fingered the covers of the old records, smiling and nodding when he found something satisfactory and familiar. Julia could almost smell the must of the vinyl and hear that soft sound of pressured air as the records leaned into each other.

Bernard still did not appear after this thought. Julia began to worry a little now. She rose from the warmth of her cotton sheets, her old faded nightgown sliding over her knees where it had crawled up to in the night. She let the floor get sturdy under her feet before putting on her slippers. Julia felt the nervous tremble in her hands begin and hoped she could keep herself from a state of panic.

The lazy morning sun was piling in through the sheer curtains and Julia walked to the window and pulled one aside. The street below was bustling with early morning commuters and children off to the last days of school and old folks that had no other place to be. She scanned the area feverishly for sight of Bernard. There was no trace of him. Julia turned from the window and went to the kitchen to start the coffee. Bernard will want coffee when he returns, she thought.

Julia sat at the kitchen table, the coffee in her mug now cold as she stared at it. It was nearing noon and still he had not come home. Her face looked more aged than it should be at 62 and her thinning hair lay in ragged, dirty strands about her face. Something caught her eye from the center of the table. It was a paper or a card with Bernard’s name and face. Julia reached out but did not touch it. She was unsure of what it could be, or what it could mean. Her arm hung suspended in air, frozen in fear, until at last the tips of her fingers felt the laminated paper beneath them.

She pulled it closer to her face. There was Bernard staring at her so handsome in his wavy chestnut hair and warm smile. She touched his face, his teeth, his eyes, his curved nose. Julia read the words:

“Bernard Jones, loving husband, lay to rest in the arms of God. April 19th, 2010. He is survived by his wife Julia (Martin) Jones.”

“No,” she cried, “no!”

The shiny paper fell from her hand onto the floor. Her arm dropped into her lap like a weight. Julia began to cry.

“How could you leave me Bernard? I loved you from the attic of the world, from that ivory tower you rescued me from. I loved you wider and deeper than any ocean. I loved you. How could you leave me?”

There was nothing but the sound from the street to answer Julia; nothing but the wind blowing the curtains inward; nothing but the pounding of her own heart and the dripping of water into the sink. There was nothing.

I thought about walking to the liquor store
to buy a beer. and not just any beer.
one a them good tasting ones,
the kind that cost more than two dollars.

but the longer I debated, the less I walked.
and eventually I settled on lemon flavored
soy yogurt.

such is my life these days.