Thank you, sir.
Let's see if I can do this without spilling.
It's great to be here.
I want to say to Charles Alexander, who has completely
outdone himself.
If you look around you, there are an incredible number
of beautiful books from Chax press.
And he seems to have done, in one week,
about a year's worth of publishing.
And I'm really delighted and honored
that my new book is one of those books.
And then I want to say, also, that it's a special pleasure
to get to read with Charles Bernstein again
and to read with Barb Henning, I think,
for the first time outside of POG board of directors'
collective readings.
So I'm going to read four sections from the new book.
If I'm running a bit long, I'll throw one overboard.
So here we go.
"Hey, Democritus, whiz, ay!
I'm made of fraying chain mail.
If so, I'll collapse in the bottom
in a glittering heap with a little viscous rebound,
resettling like in the crash dummy commercials, but shinier.
Whoo, I need earmuffs.
Kleinerman, damn it, why don't you look where you're going?
Some plunging atoms are boinging like soft bees.
And a rubberized clog dance right next to me,
coalescing into Harold Bloom, thanks to the spell checker.
His tie goes shooting up past his neck
like a noose in a cosmic draft.
Oh, romantic cosmic venicular, keep falling.
Shit, look out.
Bang, the chain mail goes gooey in the friction
of plunge stuff.
I'm silver metal bubblegum now glommed onto Harold's face.
So I'm John's octopus--
I mean, Harold's John's octopus.
A rat comes ricocheting toward us from the right, quick IED
disposal calculus.
A roadside bomb explodes in the void below your feet,
rushing off to the left-hand void now.
I vow to save all beings.
Yours truly, the chain mail gum.
Waking to slithering and fangs luminous numina.
I'll miss you.
Apostrophe hurdles up too in the windy rage.
Erg cosmos, I greet you at the end
of a great career, which, nonetheless, must have had
a long foreground somewhere.
The floating, delicate light on bushes and grasses.
Kinetic testicles, scrotal sac, wind.
Thanks, Walt. You walk through the wash sand
on the hill outside Santa Fe.
The creosote bush looks at you a final time,
and the sand does, and the furs in the gently falling koan
about snow, which is not falling in that other place,
hence falling in that other place.
This is how it is for me, signed the bubblegum.
Something wicked this way comes, shrieking up through wind.
But can this be if there's no air?
But there's snow here.
And in the cross drift, rising and falling,
it floats and hovers, buoyed by the air that isn't here,
like real snow hopping lightly horizontal for a while.
It is real snow.
Lighting up the void, the moonlight
catches it from the top, and side, and the underside,
tender void through which the soft rocks fall,
approaching light, speed, bump.
I greet you.
I'm turning into Walt again.
Great, whack me in billowy drowse I can repay you.
Coin of the realm, which is breath.
Exhaling thoughts to the vanished air.
They hover and pulse as snow.
Richard Hell and the Voidoids?
Nope, Willie Nelson singing "Moonlight in Vermont" again.
Icy finger waves?
I see finger waves.
I don't get it.
A snow drift ripples through my face.
Cold, wavy muscles, they pass it along into chattered air.
Morphed mats of light.
Telephone, I don't think Democritus
can be the origin of democracy.
There goes the other son in a ball turned into snow,
and mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heaped stones,
and elder, and mullein, and pokeweed.
The chain mail came from the stars.
I mean, it was then.
I came from mud, falling in wind,
now glittering like the mind that
made all this at 11:41 AM in sun through the ambient cloud
filter again."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]