Bicho aquí,
aquí contra esto,
pegada a las palabras
te reclamo.

Ya es la noche, vení,
no hay nadie en casa

Salvo que ya están todas
como vos, como ves,
intercesoras,

llueve en la rue de l'Eperon
y Janis Joplin.

Alejandra, mi bicho,
vení a estas líneas, a este papel de arroz
dale abad a la zorra,
a este fieltro que juega con tu pelo
(Amabas, esas cosas nimias
aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore

las gomas y los sobres
una papelería de juguete
el estuche de lápices
los cuadernos rayados)

Vení, quedate.
tomá este trago, llueve,
te mojarás en la rue Dauphine,
no hay nadie en los cafés repletos,
no te miento, no hay nadie.

Ya sé, es difícil,
es tan difícil encontrarse

este vaso es difícil,
este fósforo.

y no te gusta verme en lo que es mío,
en mi ropa en mis libros
y no te gusta esta predilección
por Gerry Mulligan,

quisieras insultarme sin que duela
decir cómo estás vivo, cómo
se puede estar cuando no hay nada
más que la niebla de los cigarrillos,

como vivís, de qué manera
abrís los ojos cada día

No puede ser, decís, no puede ser.

Bicho, de acuerdo,
vaya si sé pero es así, Alejandra,
acurrúcate aquí, bebé conmigo,
mirá, las he llamado,
vendrán seguro las intercesoras,
el party para vos, la fiesta entera,

Erszebet,
Karen Blixen

ya van cayendo, saben
que es nuestra noche, con el pelo mojado
suben los cuatro pisos, y las viejas
de los departamentos las espían

Leonora Carrington, mirala,
Unica Zorn con un murciélago
Clarice Lispector, agua viva,

burbujas deslizándose desnudas
frotándose a la luz, Remedios Varo
con un reloj de arena donde se agita un láser
y la chica uruguaya que fue buena con vos
sin que jamás supieras
su verdadero nombre,

qué rejunta, qué húmedo ajedrez,
qué maison close de telarañas, de Thelonious,
que larga hermosa puede ser la noche
con vos y Joni Mitchell
con vos y Hélène Martin
con las intercesoras

animula el tabaco
vagula Anaïs Nin
blandula vodka tónic

No te vayas, ausente, no te vayas,
jugaremos, verás, ya verás, ya están llegando
con Ezra Pound y marihuana
con los sobres de sopa y un pescado
que sobrenadará olvidado, eso es seguro,
en un palangana con esponjas
entre supositorios y jamás contestados telegramas.

Olga es un árbol de humo, cómo fuma
esa morocha herida de petreles,

y Natalía Ginzburg, que desteje
el ramo de gladiolos que no trajo.

¿Ves bicho? Así. Tan bien y ya. El scotch,
Max Roach, Silvina Ocampo,
alguien en la cocina hace café

su culebra contando
dos terrones un beso
Léo Ferré

No pienses más en las ventanas
el detrás el afuera

Llueve en Rangoon ---

Y qué.

Aquí los juegos. El murmullo

(Consonantes de pájaro
vocales de heliotropo)

Aquí, bichito. Quieta. No hay ventanas ni afuera
y no llueve en Rangoon. Aquí los juegos.

And Wally's translation of the Joni part of the poem:

the Uruguayan girl that was kind to you
whose real name
you never got to know,
what a mismatch, what a wet game of chess,
what a "maison close" made of spiderweb, of Thelonious,
how long how beautiful can the night be
with you and Joni Mitchell

I want to live on Mulholland Drive
By Laurel Canyon Park
And write songs with Joni Mitchell
Light candles when it's dark
I want to drive the Ventura Highway
And turn south to Playa Del Rey
We'd have dinner in Santa Monica
And Joni would offer to pay.
(boom boom!) I had a dream about Joni Mitchell last night. We
were writing songs in Laurel Canyon. It was a gorgeous
dream. I made up the dinner in Santa Monica bit, though.

With her voice full of swords and blossoms,
salt and blond honey, voice
like the ruffle of air off the tip
of the heron's wing,
she sings the scrawl of blood
and the fiery scripture
of nerves
written under the skin.

We've slept like mountains, but now
drum and saxophone swim
in our bodies,
hook-jawed salmon that leap
the black keys, dying
for the drowned genital stars,
their fine bones singing like tuning forks.

And there are guitars
overflowing like drunken goblets,
shiny sea-turtles dragging
inland, heavy with eggs. There are
sparrows dreaming in the cradles of her wrists,
and roses, and ashes, and oceans
collapsing on empty beaches, sliding
back helpless and rising again.

Parking at The University of Central Florida
For lack of superior eloquence
Is a bitch

Will someone please explain to me
Why I have to leave my house
And drive 20 minutes
For a class I won't have
For two hours?

I know this

Muggy
Humid
Mosquito-infested
Backwards-ass
State

Is supposed to be
Someone's idea of "Paradise"

But seriously, the last thing we need
Is another parking lot

Or better yet
How about we actually pay to have
More parking installed on campus

Instead
Of spending students' tax dollars
To support building a new stadium for a football team
No one cares about

That hasn't won a game since&

Nevertheless

Right now
Joni Mitchell
Can bite my ass

In fact, let's call this poem

"Joni Mitchell Can Bite My Ass"

I've been on campus for 10 minutes
And I've been driving
Outside the Communications building
For seven of them

Having not eaten today
I was thinking I was smart
For going through the drive-thru at Taco Bell

Then wolfing down meat, tortilla and cheese
And a soft drink
In the tradition of my father

The master at one-handed
Eat-on-the-go
Driving

But now

The two chalupas
One soft taco
A one hard shell taco crunch wrap

Are starting to bubble
In my stomach with volcanic tension

10 minutes becomes 15

The only thing worse
Than being followed by jackasses
Who trail behind students on their way to class, asking
"Are you leaving?" with their windows rolled down

Is becoming one of them

Their vehicles turn corners like sharks
They pace slowly behind pedestrians and sorority girls
Like giant monitor lizards

Hulking dinosaurs
Waiting for wounded prey
To collapse

I begin to scout behind parked cars
For spaces without a shadow on the ground
A tip I picked up from an ex-girlfriend

"Fuck!" (A motorcycle)

"Damn it!" (A Honda)

"Fer fuck's sakes!" (Another motorcycle)

I finally find a parking space
The pickup next to me
Is all sorts of over the line

I have to do my best Indiana Jones impression
Squeezing between my door
And the truck's passenger side
Just to get out

I make it out of my car
Speed-walk my way
To the nearest restroom
I don't so much shit
As lay an egg

Hours later
I'm out of class
And return to my car

A yellow sheet
Flaps in the wind
From beneath my windshield wiper

It's a parking ticket
For a decal that expired
Yesterday

Parking at UCF

Truly

Is a beast that eats its young

"I found this in The New Zealand Listener - a weekly news/info. magazine we have here. It was in a section called "AMP 246" and the description goes: 'AGE LIMIT: This page is specifically for original articles, poems, letters, short stories, artwork and photos by people of school age only.'"

You don't know what you got till it's gone,
I never realised the truth in that song.
When you can't see the world
And you can't live your life,
It feels like you're sitting on the edge of a knife.

Hidden away, locked in a cage
All my despair comes out in rage.
I am inert, unable and lonely,
Life's suffocating here, and far from homely.

Trying to comprehend the days to come,
The many hours I'll cry and be watched by someone.
Familiar faces will come and go,
Each moment passing a little more slow.

By my eyes will remain open, searching the sky,
I'm waiting so restlessly to spread my wings and fly.
I have so much to make up for,
Yet, there's so much I've learnt,
Unsure if I'll be forgiven by those whom I've hurt.

I've been to the bottom, looked myself in the eye,
I've met who I am, and found I wasn't shy.
Nothing could have prepared me, not anyone I know,
For this rollercoaster ride - the few highs and many lows.

This just in: Debra Shea has provided us with this new information:

The following is from "A Manual for Manuel" by Julio Cortazar, published in Argentina in 1973 as "Libro de Manuel", translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, English translation copyright 1978, pages 356-358. I've typed it out exactly as it's printed, except for these things that I can't do in this plain text message: anything between ** and ** is italicized, the name Falu has an accent over the u, Andres has an accent over the e, Gomez has an accent over the o, and Cortazar has an accent over the first a. I typed out what comes after the end of the poem (which really does end with a comma) only because I love the listing of women, that includes Joni, and the phrase, "their laws on my body." I don't know exactly what that means, but I like it anyway.

When the snails parade
and leave a trail that sketches out the lettuce taste
changing its drivel of delight into the perfume of the full
moon

I am the one who listens in Paris
to Joni Mitchell sing

the one who between two smokes
felt time go by for Pichuco
and Robert Firpo

My grandmother talking to me in a garden in Banfield,
a sleepy suburb of Buenos Aires,
**"Snail, snail
let the sun shine on your tail."**

Maybe that's why on this suburban night
there are snails, Joni Mitchell, American girl,
who sings between two drinks,
between a Falu and a Pedro Maffia
(I haven't got any more time and I don't care for fads,
I mix Jelly Roll Morton and Gardel and Stockhausen,
blessed be the Lamb)

What a strange thing
being Argentine on this night,
knowing I'm going to an appointment
with no one, with a woman who belongs to someone else,
with someone who spoke to me in the dark,
that I'll arrive soon
for what

What a strange thing
being Argentine on this night,
the voice of Joni Mitchell
between a Falu and a Pedro Maffia,
a cocktail of memory, **rare blend of Musetta and Mimi,**
to your health, Delfino, childhood comrade,
being Argentine in a Paris suburb
**"Snail, snail, let the sun shine on your tail."**
Pichuco's concertina, Joni Mitchell,
Maurice Fanon, girl, **me souvenir de toi,
de ta loi sur mon corps,**
being Argentine, walking
to an appointment with whom and for what reason,
such a strange thing
without renouncing Joni Mitchell
being Argentine in this black stain,
Fritz Lang, I am Andres, just tell me,
that house behind the trees,
there certainly, the cedars and the silence,
everything falls together, but then
everything begins to be nothing again,
knowing that I will come to an appointment
with a woman who belongs to someone else,
what a strange thing

("Someone wants to speak to you," a waiter
in a white jacket, the gesture pointing
to the room in the dark)--
I'm coming, my friend,
wait till Joni Mitchell finishes,
till Atahualpa's silent, I'm getting there,
open, Ludmilla, they're waiting for me
in a dark room.
it's a Cuban, the waiter said, he has something
to tell you.
I dreamed all that, of course, and suddenly I remember
precisely on arriving here, the black stain opens,

I see a face, I hear a voice, everything that I dreamed Fritz Lang I remember, like a sheet that's torn in half that garden with cedars in the shadows I remember without surprise, the surprising thing is almost not having recognized it before, from the beginning, on waking up, so clear and obvious and even beautiful to remember it while I approach the door of the chalet and raise my hand so they won't kill me without at least knowing who I am and that I'm not coming to sell them out, what a strange thing being Argentine in this garden and at this hour, plunged into madness and remembering Ludmilla and Francine and Joni Mitchell, their laws on my body, women and voices and bodies and books while I raise my arms so they'll see me easily, Gomez or Lucien Verneuil or maybe Marcos crouching behind the windows, ...

Pas de Deux from a Distance

togetherness shadow on the asphalt
cemented perishability
under the sun, under the sun
nothing to search for afterwards
"songs are like tattoos"
your disgraceful steps down to the rhythm
night steps toward my door
night steps never to enter
...like tattoos
painfully engraved in the body
your songs so far from any music ever
town trams following up each other
town trams never to stop
..like tattoos
stingingly in graved in the being
your humming words covering the poem
flash lights clinging to the windows
yellow flashes on the walls
togetherness shadows on the walkways

Paved Paradise I guess Joni Mitchell was pretty right on,
When she said that we’ll never know what we’ve got until it’s gone,
Can you envision this to be true,
Imagine that this has happened to you,
Life’s intimacies are dulled,
Perception slows,
Reflexes go sluggish,
You lag behind,
Can you comprehend?
One day, the picture perfect sky cracked into millions of tiny pixels,
Then the sun boils, blisters, pops and oozes dry,
The sedatory crash of the ocean waves turns to high-pitched wails,
Melody siphens into monotone,
Everything changes in a flash,
Emotions turn up the volume,
Pains cringe out of unknown places,
How you are is not the same,
As how you once were,
Now deal with it!
Smoke comes out of the tractor’s exhaust,
Your paradise has been paved,
And they’re installing a parking lot,
Ooh, Da, da, da, da, Ooh, Da, da, da, da,
"Beep, beep,
That’s my space."
In time, you’ll be looking for a parking space,
And you’ll never know what was once there in that place,
Worse yet and what’s a scare,
You will not know what could have been there,
Your senses are contorted,
Others may look at you as a fool,
Things are not as you have once known,
Yet you know who you are, so everything’s cool,
You don’t yet realize what you cannot do,
Just try to not let it get to you,
Your paradise has been paved-
Like it or not, Accept it, it’s what you’ve got.
~~((*))~~
Well, as a visitor to paradise that’s been paved,
Can the losses now better be appraised?
I ask you, can you appreciate your ordinary paradise before it is paved?
Or do you just go through your hum-drum charade?
Brain Injury paves over our glories extra-ordinaire,
You know, the ones that before we didn’t even care,
We tend not to think twice about our capabilities,
because we have quite a lot,
I guess we truly don’t realize it until them we don’t got.

tonight I heard Allen Ginsberg died
and cried for the Beat not to be buried
like Emily Bronte or Hitler
in that dirt bunker
of eternity

I wept in silence
for the grace of Ginsberg
and his generation

Jack Kerouac and company
the midcentury march
poetry and art on the cutting edge

tonight I heard Allen Ginsberg die
in the eye of a sly solstice
that deception of April spring
while I performed poetry and song
in New Cumberland Pennsylvania
at a pub called The Wire

tonight I heard Allen Ginsberg die
and cried for the Beat
tapping my feet to a song
Dean Moriarty's Dream
then -- On the Road in America

two times I saw you in the flesh
the first in Philadelphia
at a spring rally
the Hare Krishna had
taken over a strip of downtown Philadelphia

You were uptown
at the campus of the University of Pennsylvania
giving an open air reading on the lawn
with your famous accordian
It was 1974

The other time I recollect, was the next year
at Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review
in a small Niagra Falls auditorium
you were touring with the troops
Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Joan Baez,
Joni Mitchell, Rivera the fiddler,
members of the band,
the entourage at hand

I remember the sight of you,
Buddha belly,
the long bearded Jew,
a high priest in black,
strolling the aisle back and forth,
a poet stroking the base of his beard,
a thinking man's Rodin
in motion, taking trodden steps
like the lead-laden weight
of an elephant's gait
his footprints on a solemn slate of history

You were composing verse
in the tercets of silence
like a mime pining the air
as Dylan sang from his Desire album
Isis, Hurricane Carter,
Sarah, the sentimental stuff
coined in the past

later your verse would appear
as postscript in Rolling Stone Magazine
with a picture of you and Dylan reminiscing
singing at Kerouac's grave

We wonder now how to honor you
should we howl at the wind
pretend you can hear, say Kaddish
the Jewish prayer for the Dead
anoint your Buddha head
with tendrils of sainthood
or the irreverent imprint of a poet
like Walt Whitman who held nothing
back, as if both of you
prodigy and son, were naked
to a blushing world

It was your Sunflower Sutra poem
an ode to the Haight Ashbury generation
I remember most
the one I kept crumpled in my guitar case
in the plastic purse where steel strings,
not verse, are usually kept
that, and your reference to Blake and boys,
the way you toyed with language,
bounced your voice
like silly putty off the minds of poets,
come-by-lately lookers, hookers,
curiosity seekers in the crowd.

Holy, holy, holy,
is poetry sung
the life lived rung by rung
in harmony with the self

Verlaine, Rimbaud,
were taken by the undertow
now you succumbed,
to the rumble of the drum

Holy, holy, holy,
is the rim of the canyon,
the chagrin where clouds gather
and the sun sets
on the face of the day

tonight I heard you die
in the irony of Spring
then thought you might be drifting
like Hale-Bopp, in a vacant lot,
on the dark corridor of sky
puffing on peyote
like a mischievous child
with rhyming Jack, pretending
to map out a trip, Neal Cassidy style,
in the desert with Dean Moriarty all the while enamored with lovers and peers,
dining with ancient poets,
or scorning Hitler for the debt of his deeds,
picking weeds, like a Dharma bum

on the run to another gig
in the city, or country,
in that garden of paradise
somewhere in the Buddha night