AWP: A JOURNAL OF THE TIMEWARP: 2010

I love AWP.

I love the plane, the sleeplessness, the sea of insecurities. I love the faces swimming out at you as if from the book jackets where they keep. All you famously shimmering minnows. I love your sweet glances and your rash, judgmental disappearances.

I love to smile like a thief.

Apples, oranges, coffees, chocolates, a sweater, 12 new books of poetry.

I don't love your turkey legs, your homelessness, your dry elevation sickness.

I love your blue horse Luis Jimenez.

Your convention center Blue Sex Bear.

I love your superciliously necessary cane, with its silver handle and its sealed blade.

"Everything is so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other, what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissable--it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it, the person who built a home finds himself barred from entering it, the merest contact, a touch so taken for granted it was barely conscious, becomes an affront or an insult and it is as if one had to ask permission to touch oneself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for could poison the air or provoke nausea, they must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition); the reverse is true too: what was once mocked is taken seriously and the person once deemed repugnant is told: 'I was so wrong about you, come here.' 'Sit down here beside me, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before.' That is why one must always ask for a postponement: 'Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!' I quoted to myself. Tomorrow you might want me alive, even for only a half an hour, and I won't be there to grant your wish, and your desire will be as nothing. It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there is only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still traveling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, insubstantial and unfinished me, no one should trust me either. . . "

Charlegne Place.

Gurl.

I love your Cake-up. Your Crazy. Your slumber party melt down.

Bitch, where my jackpack?

Who's DNA is this dangling on a floss outside my 29th floor window?

"How do you stay sane at this thing? I feel like's it's sucking me dry! I cried through that poem, that standing ovation, it's too much. How do you keep yourself from going crazy?"

I make my billion promises and then I break each one.

I skip as many poetry readings as possible. I walk out of each of 2,729 panels I sit down in.

I give lots and lots of kisses. I talk shit. I text message rudely and incessantly.

I ask Jean Valentine to sign me in a crevice.

I leave a day and a half early and sneak off to Boulder, Colorado, where a mountain boy has promised me raw sugar.

"The sad one doesn't know what to do or how to behave, trying first one thing and then another and then the opposite of each, racking their brains for ways of making themselves interesting again or forgiven even though they don't know what fault it is they've committed, and nothing works because they are already condemned, they try being charming or unpleasant, gentle or surly, indulgent or critical, loving or belligerent, attentive or uncouth, flattering or intimidating, understanding or impenetrable, but the result is confusion and a lot of wasted time."

I waste time, I waste time. With my dear ones, in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, all afternoon, all my wasted time is laughter, laughter, sushi, cab rides, embraces in the middle of a street because of cancer, because of the romance of not having a working cellphone, because my TCells are normal, because you licked my coat the color of a cherry ludenz, because your skin is Picasso-esque today and you're cracking up, old, bad, long gone, you're on your way out and you're here in my arms, the way the truth is, the same way I'm alone but I'm with you for a minute, too. I'm here for the monumental burning of these scarce islands, for a little fierce face time, to swim near you but not with you, with you but only for this Time as it blurs me from your sight.

Stranger, I don't care, I don't. Not about the sea filled with the frenzy of your reflections.

I'll park my ass in the back of Falling Rock Tap House on Blake street between 19th and 20th.

I'll gossip motherhood and primitive visions and WILLA I will read your story about stealing a car radio when you're ill.

I'll get lost and try to walk back through the black neighborhoods off Colfax, prancing around in my red leather belt and tight 7 Diamond designer jeans, while Gurl gets crazy tryn to pee in a church. Beware all ye slaves that enter here.

I'll hang on to that Oskar for dear life, for dear life, and watch my Self dissolve in the black mirror of my sunglasses as he puts them on and lays his childhood across my cashmered heart.

My press is dead, my beautiful book's press is dead. Long live my only fucking press!

Babyfucker. That's the book I wished but did not steal!

I did steal Fever and Spear by Javier Marias. He might as well be writing about all the refracted blisses of the timewarp of AWP, all the misunderstandings of the unwelcomed, the mindless and chattering self-inflations, the sheer egomaniacal endlessness, the bartalk and the insincerity, the good rough and felt affection, the brief reunions and intentionally missed elevator-encounters, the mask, the flutter, the yearning, the yawn, the flinch and sharp revolt, the spasms and spasms of laughter and true friendship, the straight-forward recognition of those I touched and held, touched and held, their finally palpable visitations, their small leavings, and the quake I felt at having been close to them for a time. Friends and Phantoms. With you. Time that is now fled. Time that is a hesitation now distorted into love. And an irritation that I never will deny.

. . . . . . . .

WHAT I DID IN CHICAGO AWP, 09

THURSDAY:

The Aphorism: Life Is Short

Union: A Conversation in Poetry

Diverging Lines: Understanding the Evolution of Contemporary Latino Poetry

The City: Real and Imagined

Six Ways of Looking at Stevens

Poetic Responses to AIDS

American Hybrid: The Meeting of Extremes

FRIDAY:

The Poets of the American Hybrid

The Poetry of Thom Gunn

The Academy of American Poets Presents: Frank Bidart and Mary Jo Bang It

A Tribute to a Stranger: Thomas James

SATURDAY:

Art to Art: Ekphrastic Poetry

Prison Poets: Teaching Behind the Razor Wire

Tomaz Salamun Reading

What I Really Did at AWP, Chicago 09

Draped my black coat over the fast noise and names.

Best Manuscript titles: Cocktails with Hitler, Granny's Taco Needs a Drink and Other Children's Stories, and the Pulitzer prize-winner: Breakfast With A Wet Gun.

A lapdance in Starbucks, or just Starbucks.

Hot chocolate in Kitty O'Shea's. A gay couch. No I am Not a wet dream.

Sean you were my best accomplice. You're going to burn in hell.

In the French Gardens, Lips and I watched the servants interrupt the chandeliers.

My valentine with the breakfast guy, who likes to be peed on. For REALs.

Getting a nibble from Lemon. Pockets full. Eyes full. 

Limon has secrets in her rainblack hair. Behave!

Moleface ruins my coffee but hands me his card. 

In the bathroom I meet the mouth for later. Later the snow falls on our dream. 

I defend the Eyepatch. The Eyepatch and I eat our miseries and then flee.

I text the leathergod, and he says Miguel.

Justice keeps her in line, good morning bitch. Did you sleep well? Good girl.

The books I wanted were already stolen. 

If you tell anyone I'll deny it completely.

CONFESSIONS OF A GREEN LIGHT IN THE CITY: AWP NYC

. . . . . . .

1. Virgin America: pink mood and purple lighting, digital t.v. Early landing in NYC. "Seat 9F has sent you a message. Would you like to accept?"

2. "I laughed ambiguously. Deep night in the fireless temple. Cold knees. The great ancient pillars of the temple towered round us as we sat there huddled in our secret conversation."

3. Chelsea Hotel, corner of Lexington and 23rd. The darkness makes a scarf.

4. Michael Burkard reads a ruby. He touches my book. My shadow laughs.

5. Apizz. An Italian gnozzi. A walk to St. Marks. A mouth, a bruise before morning.

6. I sign my book and someone claps and says "passion."

7. A thief pursues his darkness. If you dare me to, I will exploit the underside of this beauty.

I've come home with these books:

Michael Burkard's Envelope of Night
Tadeusz Rozewicz' New Poems
Paul Guest's Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
Rigoberto Gonzalez' Butterfly Boy
Jane Miller Midnights
Donald Revell Thief of Strings
Laura Jensen's Memory
Dean Young's Primitive Mentor
Kazim Ali's The Fortieth Day
Juliet Patterson's The Truant Lover

and four chapbooks:

Sean Nevin's A House That Falls
Charlie Jensen's The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon
Mathias Svalina's Creation Myths
Stephanie Lenox's The Heart That Lies Outside the Body

8. Breakfast at 5 in the evening. 2 Girls and a Cup. A few hours drink themselves like smokes at night to absence. James Hall. Eduardo. A storm of black.

9. I get a Valentine Tattoo. She steals my pen, then gives me a nail file to make my great escape.

10. Eduardo you snore like a Godzilla. But first: "Did you feed him?"

11. Rathkamp, Pollack, Schnabel, MOMA. Winter, your blackbird is broken into pencil, green shadow.

12. My book sells out, thanks to Javi Huerta. His book is worth two of mine.

NY Fashion Week, I love your heels and glam!

14. I marry Kelly and B. A rip in time. Bathsheba is imagined, born, loved, loathed and sold into pornography.

13. On the white envelope we pay the bill. We eat the pizza next to a time warp. Time loves us, the way we love each other.

15. Two Aussies in Central Park. The high kick. I say, she's so demure. He says, you're not tall enough to model. Anyone call themself a mandarin?

16. Perseus has a great ass. At the Met more Rothko and Twombly. More gold mask. More than green rain.

17. I love to shop at Faconnable and split my feet until I eat some lollies. Wear flats?! You must be crazy--

18. Two bags, Whole Foods. Opera Singer, hurtling softly his Italian arpeggios through the late car toward the subway Bronx.

19. Mint Teabag. he Want, he got.

20. Snow. To return. Green foam is sprayed on each wing.