This is kind of new.
"Why weren't you Tenney?
I was Tenney--
Oh, I should say, the two best lines from the poem
were lifted from Frank O'Hara, so you get
to figure out which they are.
Three, actually.
"Why weren't you Tenney?
I was Tenney.
Yippee, I'm glad I'm alive.
I'm glad you're alive too, baby, because I want to fuck you.
We're alive and we're dead.
We think we're alive now and we'll be dead later,
but that's baloney.
The idiom of American zen is the idiom of American poetry.
Save a ghost in JA48 point Houdini type.
We're swimming through the bardos,
paddling around the shallow water park amid the oscillating
mass of light.
It's not funny.
The tree over there is a ghost waving its branches.
Hi, I can save them all.
No, this is the tree.
All them people over there, including Tenney Nathanson,
associate professor of-- huh?
I'm AutoCorrect, my friend is your friend.
The spell checker with that rank, glug, glug, glug.
Save a ghost doesn't want to horse around right now,
so it bathes your cement head in cement and water and wind
and light, drifting through now from the other stars.
Swell that it's rhizomatic.
My mother is a ghost.
She saves Ghost Tenney.
A hungry ghost doesn't know it's a ghost, so it's hungry.
Is that right?
So you feed it its ghostness, and it
morphs along the rows of oscillating current.
They look a little like rotating lit-up doormats.
Katsu, don't yell at the poor ghosts!
Please, they have it hard enough being
gay and straight and ghostly.
Please don't feed the ghosts.
Quadralingual sign on the French National Railway
you can safely ignore.
In Italian, it said it's dangerous to stick
your head out the window.
Ha ha.
Tim ghost, Charles ghost, Barb ghost, Frank ghost,
corporate poetry pop ghost.
Victim, person where can any dust alight ghost.
Family correctly not enumerated by name, all ghosts.
Bobby Thompson ghost, souvenir ball ghosts, Don DeLillo
brilliant chapter ghost.
J. Edgar Hoover ghost.
Siri and Paul in Brooklyn ghost.
John Ashbery's Vermont notebook ghost.
Air ghost, wind ghosts, the testicles
and scrotal sac ghost.
Yes, wind whose soft whispering genitals tickle against me
ghost.
Scruffy Walt ghost, canny Emily ghost, Walt canny, too.
My beautiful doggie ghost.
My live doggie and my dead doggie.
Allen Ginsberg sightless in Moloch ghost,
enlightenment ghost.
Enlightened one falls into a well ghost,
climbs back out ghost.
Quit that.
Where do we find ourselves?
Along a huge prospect overlooking the Pima County
landfill.
Plastic bag shreds blow happily along.
A huge snake slithers across the sky,
and the Tucson basin shudders.
No, it's the snake that shudders.
No, the mine.
The mine doesn't shake, but it does Mickey's monkey mind.
Lum-dy, lum-dy, lie.
Lum-dy, lum-dy, lie-eye.
I have no idea how to spell it, wallowing along
the oral tradition bardo.
The grizzled spell-checker lies down in total despair and dies,
but not before correcting "grissled", the old fart.
I don't know if I can let my ghostly dead drift slowly
through my ghost body.
Four months later, why not?
Yes, mud mine, all right.
Frankly, I'm assuming that everything
is all right and difficult. But is snow
falling in that other place?
Oh, I am a ghost.
And where I am, the ghost snow falls
and drifts at a 30-degree angle horizontally through air which
isn't there, unless I say so.
Though being a ghost now, standing
in ghost snow, what I say drifts down
like snow that isn't there, dissolved
in air that isn't there.
But in you is the "huh?"
when all the stars are mute.
Yasutani as t0 destruction everything
is destroyed, as to no, nothing is destroyed.
Which leaves you today's air, that means me,
the ghost formerly known as Tenney.
Thump, thump, thump.
Orange brick wall very bright now.
Huge pinon waving energetically in the stiff breeze,
maybe even agitated.
Are you OK, tree?
Remember, you're a ghost.
Just this this.
I'll dance with all your needles brushing my face
at the ghost ball, pale washed blue behind all of it,
washed by light stumping this checker.
And behind that, the shoji screens.
Eternal bric-a-brac of the Spotless Mind,
omnipresent like Big Mind, which is also a ghost, a big one.
Thank you.