From the chapbook Literoast
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Literoast
Lately
I use occasions to
Talk to people about watching tv;
Everyone
Responds statically, mouths and eyes
Oval variables: “I will only watch
A show about facts;
Science shows,
The History channel.”
Literature, not a literary comprehension, but the
Impression of the page, a
Taking of the right to speak, the
Expansion of
Rhetoric, right?
On tv:
A show about models,
Showcases about antiques
Two people arguing and looking into the
Light above the camera.
I watch it.
There’s a hierarchy here.
Egyptian style pyramids
Rare hieroglyphs, that visual must have become
Obfuscated, blurred,
Afixed to books [facts]
Sapphic valedictorians, diplomas in hand,
The New York Times bestseller list.
C=O=M=P=R=E=H=E=N=S=I=O=N
Book
Dusty Spine
TV
Antennae
Romance
Agedness
Comprehension
Variable
Linear
Image processing
TV
Annode
Cathode
Comprehension
Errant
Misdirection
Visual
Playplace
Visual
Colorful ball pit
Book
Adult waiting room, ashtray, gray walls.
Us, as in a collective static,
Waiting for them, checking
like clicking clockwork, like
wiretap signals,
our digital watches.
Antiques Roadshow
This is not to decry, but their sweaters,
their red lines and tightly woven white hoops,
their knobby tarantula leg fingers put them together.
Their dithery faces, maps or dusty tomato shaped pin cushions.
Bring me your cutouts and used instruments,
take me to your attics and storage units,
Stairs, that creeky wood is time enough for explaining things,
things, things which bang symbols and smile, things remember kids.
Each thing a value.
Booeys afloat in tables that are destroyed pieces of a ship.
Puppets, all of them necessary, pieces of a quilt:
a sewing show.
I’ve got it all and I
am looking to sell,
my own little cave, my precious
drawings marking periods of great dawning
that I can chisel from the living rock of decision
and present to the bidders.
The table is always clunky with food,
the parties are always interested, their
basket style hairdos move from object to
stern object, their cruel, leveled off brows
scan little wheels, Hummel thimbles, wire
frames, yellow papers with printed
dark depressions like tigers sleeping pelts
move up and down.
Trains, little rows of figurines, tall, long frames.
Things that held other things a long time ago.
How we grasp those things in the car on the way,
how the value is calculated so late:
I found out that the experts determine the value
of objects long before the show airs.
It’s just that I’ve got all these things,
little pins meant for marking
or waiting to be used in
in the tips of my fingers.
Hello. I don’t patterns, her cuneiform.
watch it but The Egyptians used a
if I did I’d pre combination of visua
fer a show abo l images and text var
ut something us iations to tell stories,
ful; I see poor pe though the show on
ople every day, right now, about ho
I ride the train p usewives in Atlanta,
ast them, I am i uses a complex syste
n school, my eye m of editing and cut
s lead to a pen, I s to interviews, and s
look out and wha till the presence of te
t I see goes into t xt is available as a sup
he poem and the a port for if the women
ct of the poem. I do don't speak loudly en
n’t let the awful sto ough or aren't yelling.
ries on tv and those Still, the forms of the
fucked up people g ir bodies, middle aged,
et to me. I’m a wri hair bleached, faces pul
ter, I read, I stay in led and blasted dark ta
circles of writers, w n or brown, the parts o
e go out and we ta f their bodies falling li
lk about writing. I’ ke stained glass will; t
m a writer; I’m a hi heir widening bottoms,
der. these ancient forms, thi
* s modern Sandscrit.
Well, I usually writ *
e or read. This electro
nic republic; my girlfri I was missing the blows,
end and I watch it toget I was mising the strikes,
her. Sometimes we missing the pay per view,
can’t agree on a sh the signal was out. My br
ow even, that’s a tw other and I were anxious i
o party system, a cu n the den, we had a pizza o
rrent thing. Even th n the way and the den had
e signals that make t been repainted. He kicked t
he shows are made o he red chair and I called ag
f smaller, gestural th ain to see when the signal w
ings. My girlfriend’s sm as going to pop on. I walked
ile, my girlfriend’s into the living room to drown
shake, her familiar my brother's curses. I looked
out the window and for a m other people were doing.
oment I wondered what
New Apocalypse
I travel by boat, I let the sea hit me in the face.
I read pages that are crispy. I turn them again
and again. I plume the margins. I drink brown drinks
in Scottish rooms that are small and brown. I hear fiddles,
and they pluck like the wires in Scottish men’s mustaches
are wiry, and when they turn upwards they are antennas
happily receiving signals.
When I lived there, writing was a game to be accompanied
by the wonderful loneliness, wherein you crunch your knees
and feet into your chest, you become a little square nook,
and things are meant to get done. In between bars and the cracks
around the stones in the streets, I am foam. I am something that bubbles
and is slowly blown off. I’m a big, clunky square waiting to be pressed on.
I take manuscript by manuscript down by the banks of the Clyde river,
I relinquish myself to my knees, and I tear each one and vomit.
With enough time to reflect, then auto-reflect, and than transmit my
thoughts to an environmental retaliation, my unwired artistry
waits on the floor for a signal. The countryside is mulled and pressed,
the very juices strained back in through tubes, guts, to be made into
something brown, pulpy: I have watched.
Scotland is shaped like two lungs, a digestive system, and a remote.
I climb the hill behind a school in Glasgow.
Scotland’s air, gray stone architecture,
it’s quite a view up there: the repressed sea,
the man-made peers bordering the warehouses
and factories. The tubes poking, the wire chicken
weathervane like a broken cookie cutter against
the static of the clouds: dark grays behind light grays,
the antennae up there.
All these little things
What are they? I spent hundreds of thousands, billions of trillions
of bites at meals deconstructing things, chew after chew,
and in each sandwich were codes and particles made of smaller particles,
meanings upon meanings, not to say meaning
is any more significant than the leftover Chinese food,
the cold, gelatinous mass and the hard pellets of rice.
These things are early morning Habanero hot sauce
which hurts my stomach, dry, salty chips, like
a mouthful of water from the sea. These places are put
together by all these little things.
What are all these little things I’ve got?
These, littler than the pixels that make the picture on the TV,
the show’s lack of flaw: these things, chloroform thick, which
make a girl in a green blanket a lima bean, or in a black blanket
a black bean. She rolls around with her head poking out.
I’ve got these buried skrillions of things which you can call what you want:
that machine that just opened up that simulates the effects
of the big bang that people thought would collapse
the entire universe; it’s called the refrigerator. the potatoes
I bought at the store in a bag. Those shows I wait to watch, and after I watch them
there will be others. The potatoes are left to wait; appropriate, natural.
I said I’d come to you as a garden.
I came to you as a garden
that was on a TV show about gardening.
Information, Fire
6:00: Houses for $300 infomercial
6:30 Shortcuts to Internet Cash infomercial
7:00: Judge Mathis: Friends with a property dispute, roommates clash
8:00: My Super Sweet 16: Amberlee; Hollywood themed party
9:00 Judge Judy: a car thief, a tenant owes payment.
10:00 TBS morning movie: Fools Rush In
12:00 Real Chance of Love: The brothers take the girls fishing
1:00: Rock of Love Girls Charm School: The girls create a band
2:00 The Pick-Up Artist: The nerds must go to club and each kiss a girl
3:00 What Not To Wear: Tiffany, an accountant from South Bend with poor style
4:00 What Not To Wear: Dakota, a PR rep from Duluth with poor style
5:00 Food Network Challenge: Cake battle
6:00 Throwdown with Bobby Flay: Grilled Cheese
6:30 Unwrapped: Hot Dogs, Carmel Corn, and an inside look at the Corn Palace
7:00 Wife Swap: Wealthy Conservative Leeanne switches with Sue Ellen from Ohio
8:00 Special 800th episode of WWE Raw
11:00 book from the bookshelf*
*The busted stalks of
great narratives are being tossed
into the communal pit,
keeping the glow alive
Russell Jaffe is an MFA in poetry graduate at Columbia College Chicago. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches at New York City College of Technology, and has served as an editorial assistant to the journal Court Green. His poems have appeared in MiPOesais, Spooky Boyfriend, Ariel, and Columbia Poetry Review. He has also written articles for Pro Wrestling Illustrated. Russell is the founder and editor of O Sweet Flowery Roses, an online poetics blog publishing featured emerging poets.
