There Are No More Cigarettes in This Letter

     

• Days after the Is Rush the Most Hated Band column comes an article on why The Eagles are the shittiest band. It must be fucking August if trolling grandpas for their classic rock is the best Salon et al can come up with.
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• The above bullet concludes today's scratching of standard aargh scabs.
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• The above bullet concludes today's bleggalgazing.
• A pound of music. 
• Re: the above, also too.
• MOCOMOFOS, is it my imagination or is the Montgomery County Fair starting a week earlier than usual or at least a week earlier than I remember when I actually went to it? I think of it as usually being a week in the 20s of August.
• Traditional story of attending the Montgomery County Fair only one person reading this will appreciate: Hobo City behind the Southern States. 
• The above sentence written before I read this, love and good luck.
• Stoner.
• Iceberg.
• The pleasures and perils of diction. 
• #200.
• Dan Green on McElroy. I was obligated and still feel (occasionally) obligated to read McElroy, I bought the latest, it wasn't fun (McElroy is almost never fun though it can be rewarding), it felt like work. This sentence from Dan: McElroy’s fiction is not so much difficult to understand as it is simply laborious to read. True that.
• The tide withdraws from around the island.
• Onaandoenlijk.
• The Wormwood Star.
• Glück.
• Reading can kill you.
• Szymborska! Click the tag below for more poems.
• Filmed at the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville:

DEAR RA

Johannes Goransson

Dear Ra,

There are no more cigarettes in this letter. It's all about spray-paint and traffic jams from here on out. Honk if you're epileptic, honk if it's 2:40 p.m., if you love shells. Honk in the name of freedom and fear of the human body. When I say "human body" I mean the kind that tears like lettuce. And when I say "fear" I mean the kind you feel seconds before crashing into a wall. That's the kind of poem this is. The kind raised on excess television violence.

All that's left are ads for brotherhood and blowjobs. An ad for 2:42 p.m. A wad of hair. This isn't Marx. I'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds me sour candy. Run down the deer. Rain. Wear a red jacket and pumps. Pave the road back from my bed. I don't own a bed, it must've been the trap I've crept in and out of since I learned how to sleep alone. The Count of Monte Cristo's funeral. God's earlobe. An army of lamb can stop a film but not the violence of handbags. Not 2:43 p.m. Two forty-four pee em. Speak from a babble and a switch. Piss in a telephone booth. Grow a tree. Kidnap a car thief. Talk to him as though you want to be slammed in his trunk like a bag full of rocks.

Talk to me in the woods. To my chest. With your fingers.

Even if you kick in the gates, nyc is still nyc. My concussion is still a hotel. The guests are staying lukewarm and I'm picking up the tab. Ask me if I have ever wanted to tear out cables, burn up cradles. Interview my architects about hands. Ask an illegal immigrant how to escape from a political cliche. Does one use hammers? What about the moist area? The brutal caress? The spindle? Where does one learn to speak such a broken language? Are you jealous of films about Vietnam?

This poem is dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. This poem is dedicated to the man who put a gun in my gullet. This poem is a pay-phone.

Someone has slashed its chords and ripped out its face. This drink is mixed with a plastic fork. This is an invitation to my Halloween party. Come as a key. Come as a metatextuai tear in the metatextual fabric.

Listen to my concert through walls that were built to keep the vermin out of my armpits. Shovel. That's all I ask in return for my sonata on gravel. I mean gravel in a dialectic sense. As in, tomorrow dirt will be glamorous. Asphalt will be categorized as a sound. You will be categorized as an outdated method of psychotherapy. Like confession. Or the couch. Or the chair. I will be classified as a sore loser. Last year's winner must have thrown something hard at my head. Something that shattered like a waltz in a bomb raid. It's almost three o'clock. That makes it exactly several thousand miles since I left your town. I left your mice. I left a confusing note for the exterminators.

I've been confused when I should have been
reborn as a crusade or a hospital of innocents.
I've been bored when I should've been screwed.
I've been a hungry year.