Feral Living would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to those unsung, hardworking heros, cheesy entertainers. Night after night, they tickle the ivories on their fancy little keyboard/synthesizers, crooning popular tunes as we sit at our wedding receptions and other gatherings, talking among ourselves, completely ignoring their efforts, their hard work, their pain, their sequins.

Hats off to you, I say. Hats off to you!

Hats off to X and Y, the two entertainers at the reception we attended last night, him in a little monkey vest, snazzy haircut and head mounted mic and keyboard, her with a sequin vest with lots of cleavage and a Julia Roberts sort of thing going, except she was like Julia Roberts pressed down to about 5′ 7″, with all the extra mass going into her caboose. They were there on the stage, crooning well-known tunes with smallish voices, he’d play sax solos and guitar solos on his keyboard. Once they took a break to announce that they were available for birthdays, weddings, and other gatherings.

Simultaneously, all over the world, in every country including North Korea and Iraq, similar entertainers were doing exactly the same thing. Entertainers genetically locked out of fame and fortune, or because of destiny and kismet, too short or too fat or too poorly connected were singing their little hearts out in their sequins and tails, dancing around and strumming their instruments, announcing during the course of the evening that they are available for birthdays and weddings.

Then packing up and going home.

Applause.

Just wanted to mention that, pound for pound, I’ve found more poems I like by poets I hadn’t heard of before at Riley Dog than at any other weblog.

Thanks, Steve.

Baz sang to me yesterday.

She gets a big slice of cake.

Joseph Brodsky
Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, born in 1940, received the Nobel Prize in 1987.

May 24, 1980

I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half teh world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile: it’s stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larnyx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
(1980, translated by the author)

This rocks, I don’t have to write anything original for an entire month.

I don’t know how to read poetry. I never learned how. Never took a poetry class, reading or writing. I read it for the shock effect, for the surprising beauty – same reason I like naked ladies.

Later I want to post a poem by Joseph Brodsky, whom I like a lot. Right now, though, here’s one I wrote about 12 years ago, when I was 30. It was even published in a real anthology.

Love Poem
Pictures of you here (paper) I have
many more in here (tap heart). Funny –
weather is not bad in any, can you believe
it? In pictures of you and me.

Sky blue as the day it was conceived.
Hiro says one day scientists
will detect suffering there, phantom
hurt that reverberates received on
instruments. Forgive your childhood which
may one day make a needle twitch.

These bridges in our life: under
some fish jumped, under others floated.
Sometimes water was so far down we
couldn’t see it right, sometimes.

Minds are made to lose, I guess.
“With this new dress, which shoes
are best?” My taste is simple, the black,
plain. If they should ever ask
about the pain, remember once I drove
you sane.

“Howl II”

[Editor's note: line breaks added by popular request]
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
pudgy hysterical naked but for tweed jackets and corduroy
pants and health shoes, dragging themselves through the
Viennese streets at dawn looking for a parking space
near the dentist’s, angelheaded hipsters with thinning grey hair
burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night and hoping to get this root canal
finished in time to get to the office without getting in too big of trouble,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and with a
stomachache from bad organic bratwurst had sat up until after midnight
the previous night in the supernatural darkness of nice family houses
floating across the tops of quaint Austrian villages contemplating
jazz and overdrawn bank accounts, who bared their
brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated and vomiting kitties drag-
ging half-dead birds into the house and letting them get away and having
to catch the fucking damn birds and put them back outside to the
consternation of the cats,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war but mostly chasing women and getting
impossibly drunk on vodka and lemonade and spraying graffitti on
university buildings that seemed embarassing the next day and
luckily didn’t get caught, who were not expelled from the academies
for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull
because publishing, eh, not so easy,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and various bars and
listening to the Terror through the wall,
but most of all really,
really wanting to get this root canal over with
only to hear the blank-eyed moth-woman behind the reception desk
say those crazy-making words,
“Oh, Mr. Miguel? 8.00 this morning? But you’re not in our computer”
and she’s not responsible and the responsible woman will be here in a minute
and so call the wife on the cell and bitch for a while until the woman comes
and she comes and gets told off to no avail and wait two hours?
Come back another day? “I have things to do, Mohammedan angels to meet”
and she says, “So next Monday this time?”
then the clear-eyed, clean-faced smooth-shaven dentist shows up
and is all friendly and gets a few trailings of anger and a
snotty “See you Monday” and it’s back to the Dobl

What, national poetry month? Like, American national poetry month? That would explain why I haven’t heard about it until now. Although, I did notice AB had gone on a Bukowski kick earlier this week… then a couple by Rilke… now they’re talking Rumi over there, and Spacecheese mentioned poetry…

Now I get it.

I used to use a Rumi quote as a tagline, “Sell your certainty and buy bewilderment”. He is a comforting and inspiring Sufi poet.

Here’s a different Rumi poem, “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you”:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks