sandrasimonds

We miss you Zach. I know that you are there--at the Boca Cafe--with me and Jay....talking about chapbooks. How we are going to make them, create them--and destroy....

Shannon didn't believe us---bust into tears.

A Poem for Andrew Mister

Laugh lines written on an old hammer. The beginning was the upside down beak of the smallest bird. Falling from a nest of cones, you can see where these bad poems hit the grass intact as writing out the lyrics to your favorite songs. Montana as an ice field we were cutting the Clark Fork with a rusty iris from here to Idaho. And then rode into Florida. Downed planes through the Everglades sang. No one died frightened enough for the laundry in a cargo hold.  A day lily explodes as if it was the most mundane thing in the world. At night, the Top Hat killer walks up the stairs to the Public Library and checks out books on which bulbs grow best in the Northwest. In November, in Oakland, I pulled chilled Orchids from a meat freezer a few days after Halloween raised from the dead ghosts (a hammer)and a little known fact in horticulture everything from the seedbed to the acid in soil must be accounted for.

So, I guess I'm going to tell you when you can see my poemies.

Action, Yes!

http://actionyes.org/issue3/simonds/simonds-riesling.html

I am coming to the conclusion that the most exquisite book that I have read in the past ten years is Villette.

But are you anybody?

As borrowed from Jay.

Now, class, today we begin our journey into the unconscious.

I had a lot of fun over the weekend--reading in New York City. Wow--New York. I can't not think of Lorca. Lorca so overwhelmed by it all. How do so many people have so many things to do? Well, I'm not sure. A and I went all around and we went to the Bronx Zoo too. I met Mark L and Jim B and Matt H and Maureen T. I also saw Matt L. This might have been the first time in my life that I have gone so long without seeing a tree.

I bought a purple pair of boots for one dollar, a stevie smith book and a scarf. 


Theory class today. Theories of plot. Can I help it if I don't care much for it? If X does or doesn't do Y and, well really, what is the difference? Seems to broad to be inclusive, too narrow to matter. (or, I am a bad reader---that I know anyway). Let's talk about something sexy, like desire! To hell with plot....

I met a Zombie

I met a zombie who was awfully depressed. He confided in me, that faceless guy. He said Sandra, I think the world is going to shit and thus goes my zombie-ness. Cheer-up zombie, I said and gave him a chocolate. The night is young, there are suburbs to prowl; there are movie directors to inspire. Nothing worked. The zombie was hell-bent on being a zombie but I told him there were other things he could be like a pharmacist or even an acrobat. Do a backflip the zombie said and I said no, I will do no such thing. The zombie said here are your drugs but I didn't take them. Who knows what kind of drugs a zombie hands out? That's not the point, zombie man--you have the powers of language on your side. You can incant and that is something we can't do. You can say whoo whooo whooo and scare us to our deaths. The zombie would not seize his rightful power and asked my adivce on a psychologist. I said I don't see one very much but I we can walk hand in hand to the hospital. The zombie said he wouldn't go and I was late, late for my class. His hand was a chocolate mess. Poor zombie. If we didn't mess up the world the way we do, you would be a happy little thing.

A Few Notes On Middle School

                        For Joe Massey

When thinking about the blood-brain barrier, one gets the distinctive feeling that drugs were invented to punctuate the membrane as skin to flea bites might articulate said analogy.  Joe suggested that I stop writing poems about aliens stealing lawn chairs and focus on things that really matter. Get yourself off Bouvet. But I couldn’t stop imagining them as a grassroots organization liberating the Fall of the Western World with their spaceships full of magnesia comma splices.

 I was thrown from a horse at a young age and that means that every horse owes me a sincere apology. Apologize Colt! (and say it like you mean it). Reasonable doubt takes on new meaning when staring up into Lightning Rod’s quasar nostrils. Things went downhill from there. I kissed the boy with one arm simply because I thought it might grow back as earthworms energize red dirt. The proposition had something to do with prosopagnosia but why use neuroscience as outside referent? Oh anyway. The aliens are going to smash their blue torsos to houses, cymbal crash family planning. In any case, friend, as you well know, marching band formations are almost as insufferable as the stadiums they inhabit--- their glow in the dark bacterium groping testubes.

Here I Am

From dilettante to your phi beta kappa law school student, Old English is a must. You'll learn the words for "beer hall" and "gem." But really, when studying pop music, what isn't important. If you consider "a blue deer on a black hill" to be experience, then that oblong object will be thrown into the whoosh! solar system far below. Anyway, these are the component parts of unrealized reverie, lacking even the form of a bare-bones flow chart. Maybe, after all, the body is a machine. The tongue chalk screeching to new tonal extremes. It’s sort of like traveling—you know, the “buy as you go” ethic or imperative. In any case, these are my dreams freeing them…selves from the purple fist that makes them more sea urchin than wave. Let me explain. Nostalgic feelings are positioned for the unrequited views of the sycamores you never bothered to uproot and let die. Or, for a closer examination of the bear claw, let the mind satisfy itself knowing of its rotten canines. Such discursive surfaces survive only if the forest is not logged to plastic or the moon is not hollowed out for a better understanding of quintessential form. Take it from me; airports are only worth the static flowing into the mouths of those simple philosophers reaching their final destinations. But if you tend to miss flights—for instance, a layover in Newark, New Jersey, why not imagine New York City? I feel sincere when I think about global capitalism—somewhat soap opera, somewhat United Airlines. I always try to chat up the Air Steward, the one based in Wichita so that he’ll give me a free margarita! I always wanted to be a steward because they seem so important being shuttled off through their transience into their synthetic otherwise in a greeting that is replayed and replayed adjacent to the flight deck.