Career Advice for Amstelbooij

The way I see it, you have three choices:

Singapore autumn
warm rain and money splashes
ladyboys blossom

Neon streetlights blinking
At night the city screams
a thousand diamond dreams
Christopher Street winking

There once was a banker from Gold Street
Who moved to Brooklyn but got cold feet
Fifteen dollars for the zoo!
I Can't believe it can you?
Now back in Chi walking his old beat
 
I think that pretty much sums it all up, don't you?

This calls for drug-addled poetry

After several days of ever-growing pain, the combination of sleep deprivation and prescription drugs has made me a bit goofy. Desperately needing something else to take the edge off, I came to the only logical conclusion: Drug Addled Poetry... and it's working. (By the way, in my head this introduction TOTALLY sounds like the opening to the A-Team.)

Can't believe the pain I'm in
Swelling void of missing tooth
Wow, I need more vicodin

For each hurt and in each sin
Acts of men but hid in youth
Can't believe the pain I'm in

Rue and guilt come with hurtin'
Part ego, but mostly truth
Wow, I need more vicodin

Poppy or scars, who will win?
Can the priest-king say the sooth?
Can't believe the pain I'm in

Will Ramsey let him slide it in?
PJ asks from in the booth
Wow, I need more vicodin

How did that gay porn creep in?
And what the fuck is a sooth?
Can't believe the pain I'm in
Wow, I need more vicodin.

One night in poetry class

I recently slipped a poetry class here at the Guthrie, mainly because the class was almost empty and I didn't want the instructor to get lonely, but also because like every well-read and underemployed person under the age of 40, I believe in me the soul a poet lurketh, lurketh like the lemming lurketh lowers't the ledge, laughing, laughing! (That was a joke, even I aim higher than that.) It was actually a surprisingly good class with a great instructor, and the small size of the class allowed us to collaborate on a poem in Elizabethan short verse about a clown trying to pick up a hooker (oh it's anything goes at the G-spot).

As it happens, recently I've been too busy walking around Chinatown in the rain trying to evoke Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, and then huddling under blankets rubbing tiger balm on my chest to ward off the bird flu to add anything to my blog, so I thought I'd just share with my vast readership the product of one of the various poetry exercises from that class:

Wily xanthous yelling Zulus after ball careening down every field, green hellions in jest keeping laughter momentarily nestled over poisonous questions racing sideways under veils.

Since that class was poetry for the stage, I also had to do a dramatic reading in character of another poem I wrote, in front of professional actors, which to me was a more daunting prospect than dubbing a Nicholas Cage film into Cantonese. So picture if you will, a grizzled Roman senator standing with the ultras at a Lazio game. In the middle of all this flashing yellow chaos my senator stands fixed in his resplendent red and white toga like a fluted ionic column being washed over by the tide, immovable, reappearing behind every wave. And he says to himself and the audience this piece of verse (nodding in the second line to the flashing jumbotron suspended over the field):

A new bread and circus
under Jove's blinking eye
I am the dying Gaul coughing
"Ca plus change, ca plus meme*"

(*-The more things change, the more they remain the same)

To an Oldtown condo

Garbage in the street
slums face off against high class
dog poop at my feet

strange hoodlums I meet
lurking bandits kick my ass
garbage in the street

tea drinking elite
behind sunlit panes of glass
dog poop at my feet

travellers find seats
as skyward trains rattling pass
garbage in the street

midwest summer heat
drifting bursts of sewer gas
dog poop at my feet

airy, light and neat
interior you can't surpass
garbage in the street
dog poop at my feet

Gidoummaboof

Dark booth
porn on the screen
some guy wants his dick sucked
poking it through the glory hole
Frenchy's!

Ode to a Girl in a White Sheet

(this poem is dedicated to beautiful women everywhere wearing sheets over their heads)

Her honeyed lips are all I know
When first my angel passes by
Beneath a sheet like fallen snow

With Cupid's aim, her mouth his bow
(do arrows make her strings pull tight?)
Her honeyed lips are all I know

In Luna's house, love's never shown,
but hooded eyes give secret signs
beneath a sheet like fallen snow

she doesn't speak, she wanders though
with sneaky kisses from behind
her honeyed lips are all I know,
 

and who can know her fingers roam
with all that warming hands can find
beneath a sheet like fallen snow?

Below her softly gasping smile
my bow will stroke her cello right
her honeyed lips are all I'll know
beneath a sheet like fallen snow.