So, I was going through my iTunes, noticing how many albums by a given artist I on average had. Here is a brief list of the artists with the most number of albums on my iTunes:

The Beatles (11)
Bob Dylan (10)
Super Furry Animals (9)
Yo La Tengo (9)
Destroyer (8)
Elliott Smith (8)
Belle & Sebastian (8)
Boards of Canada (8)
AIR (7)
The Clientele (7)
Of Montreal (7)
Wilco (6)
Okkervil River (6)
M. Ward (6)
Built to Spill (6)
Pavement (6)
Radiohead (6)

The girls
of the 1920s were
little more than willow wisps;
all legs, arms, and torsos,
only a motion of limbs and
pale thin embodiment.
Bowlers,
and short hair,
flapper dresses,
boys at their sides,
neon, satin, sequins, and utopian
Art Deco lives.

They were all too young to realize the horrors
the technologies
they invested with messianic robes,
too old to hear their parents’ cries.
From farmsteads,
they came to the big from
the small, never understanding they only ever traded
one enclosure for another.

Anyone who has tried to live in a big city –
now or then –
knows what I mean.

My limbs move in ever-narrowing
circles,
squeezed in on all sides by an
amalgamated mass of
bodies.
This is my salvation and my
poison.
The city is my God.
His angels are a host of automobiles,
carrying the living dead
from neighborhood to neighborhood,
but anyone can see there’s no space
for anyone anymore: the cities
are filling up, the graveyards
are filling up,
Hell is filling up.

But I’m not different:
another pretender in a city of fakes,
you the flighty flapper
I followed here from parts unknown,
shuffling the same worn deck of cards and wishing for
that lucky hand to play, thinking of
the girls of the 1920s,
and the cities that will be
our graves.

A row,
your interrogator face and
walk therapy.
Too cold for massages and too
dry
for rain.
Your excuses pile up;
my excuses pile up.
We’ve finished with this city
before we’ve started.
Sometimes I think about
other girls.
Sometimes
I dream of places
where it rains
more.

A man has to have snow
to write great things.
His soul must be still, white,
unmoving,
must cover over every part of his existence
like a great snowy blanket.

Like the icy, unforgiving fingers of the Muse.

On snowy days, I’ve heard
not even the wind
moves, afraid of disturbing the poetic stillness.

Even the writers who never had snow
were great snowy figures apt to chill readers to the bone
with white expanses of clarity,
cooped up like children on a snow day
in L.A., in the deep South,
on a beach in Mexico.

Great words
obliterate.
Snow obliterates.
May snow
or great words come
to obliterate
me.

The Columbia has abandoned us,
the Willamette, too; and the Guadalupe; and
San Jose. And Portland. We’re
abandoned into history. We’re run aground on
a little island,
but it isn’t really a little island — it’s
a sea monster.
Verily.

The sea monster doesn’t want to drink tea
with us; it doesn’t want
to play tennis. In fact the sea monster seems to have no
interest in anything about us, what we do or whatever happiness we’ve managed
to scrape together in this small insignificance we call existence.
In fact the sea monster seems to want us for
lunch. This sea
monster is life.

Heidegger said
we’ve been abandoned into the world.
We’ve fallen
into it.

Does this sound familiar?

We’re falling together.
I smell the concrete
who knows how far down.

“La chute” Camus called it. “The fall.”

I can’t even turn my head to look.
It
doesn’t matter.

You are here
and
it’s wonderful.

We were told the Northwest is a big foolish beast,
no sea monster: a Cerberus
for we sweet Orpheuses
to blanket with sound.

We’ll smile as we play
our lyres. We’ll sing in
harsh voices.

We’ll pluck the breath from each other’s chests
while there’s still breath left to draw.

We’ll live breathless.
Au bout de soufflé.

Is there concrete below?
Has the war started?
I don’t care.
I’m happiest when I’m with you.

You wrote in a little card,
“Coup dedans là. Tout sera OK.“
Hang in there. All will be OK.

Come sea monsters. Come Cerberus. Come fools.
Come fall.

Time: 830pm
Duration: roughly 15 minutes
Location: 5237 Stevens Creek Blvd, San Jose, CA

Your father told us about the time
he lost control of the Tahoe
on the ice.
We ate chocolate cake and went
wine-tasting.
But aren’t they the same thing?
Both only offer
acerbity’s opposite.

And
all dead soldiers look the same. And
the trees aren’t so far away.
They are not “outside.”
Where they are, and
where we may be.
It’s the same thing.
They’re just a something out of our immediate grasp
to which we prefer
frictionless function
keyboards and computer mice
and the Google map directions
your father got off his computer
(they were wrong).
The indifference of machines
and Nature’s indifference,
(her iceberg face) are
the same thing. Can’t you tell?

Doesn’t the sage bring
yes, sir and
no, sir together and rest in
Heaven
the dead man in Yossarian’s tent?
Is he a commoner there
or a commoner here?
A noble? Valiant? (Vale!)
Vivi fortuna juvat.

* * *

A month later I had a dream.
I dreamt I was a bug in the bed
of a Chinese philosopher. And
I didn’t know if I was me
dreaming I was a cockroach
lying in bed beside Chuang-Tse or
if I was a cockroach
dreaming I was me
in bed
with a copy of the Inner Chapters
lying open beside me.
But,
after squashing the cockroach
beneath a sandal
the answer became pretty clear.

But aren’t they the same thing
anyway? Me dreaming I’m not me
or not-me dreaming I’m me? And
what’s really the difference
between men of letters and
men of liquor? Don’t they both
sleep deeply?

Farmer John and
Farmer Juan…
so long as the sweet taste
of strawberries washes away
bitter panic from my mouth
it’s all the same (thing) to me.

That night I was underwater,
I was naked,
tiny bubbles clinging to leg hairs,
bubbles released, floating up like souls
to burst into Brahman’s
brisk, cold clarity,
my naked body blue,
slightly blurry beneath the water,
chest hair swaying like seaweed.
Can you blame my hunt for
opacity?
I wanted to be swallowed or
regurgitated.
Aren’t they the same thing?
Whichever’s warmest.

Am I Joe, Augustus, or St. Augustine?
Am I father, son, holy ghost?
Does it matter?
Ice breaks for the weight,
not the name.

* * *

Independence days were alike in
dignity. No, that’s not
what I meant.
They were long
(like McLoughlin)
and full of circles and city blocks
and all of them
Oregonian.
Or simply full of ladybugs.
California you could say is full
of aphids or even just plain full of
assholes. (But, the same.
Past, present, and futurum.)

Past being most unimportant,
present less so,
and future the elephant in the room,
in the present the authorities can pry license plates
off cars and shoot young ladies named Neda and we can
do nothing,
but soon oppression
and inaction will
merge and they’ll see themselves
for what (they are.
the same thing.)

What need will there be for fireworks
if the whole world burns?
Where will the cicada go
if summer never ends?

On the myspace, y’all.

All is Unknown

Thanks,
Joe

Hey everybody,

I just added ‘Oka’s toes’ to my Myspace. This is the third poem I’ve put up on my profile there, after ‘Linea Libra’ and ‘A girl in the hand is worth two under the table’. Have a listen and add me as a friend!

myspace.com/joeclinkenbeard

Thanks, Joe

Hello all,

I added ‘Linea Libra’ to my Myspace page’s music. Recorded it today. Check it out! It’s pretty quiet — my mic sucks — but if you turn up the volume a bit, the quality is great.

myspace.com/joeclinkenbeard

Thanks for the support,
Joe