Friday, April 20, 2012

speaker of the house

woke up spooked, outside
a womb. what womb? for
a walk, valu-plus, walk it off
outta business, this paper
cup life a ghost in building.
what do you say to someone
who’s working when you’re
not. you just get your gum
and go on. in passing, put a
hoodie on, the speaker no
longer recognizes you. who’s
the speaker? wasn’t it the
speaker flew to philly to speak
to the wharton school of
business but got spooked
en route and canceled when
he caught word a public would
show—people, who live there—
here, work, fight, love. stand
in the street, waiting. spokes
in a wheel, spinning—no house.
love is no house, never recognized
the speaker anyway. anyway,
get a job, get a job on a jet back
to job, says a dude on a jet in the
wind, as a job is a cloud in a hoodie.

Monday, April 9, 2012

citypaper


My good friend Chad Willenborg and I used to try to win the citypaper writing contest every year. Then they stopped having it for a while (no poetry, at least). Then they started it back up again and this year Chad, a fiction writer, persuaded me to send in some poems. We both won. We celebrated last Thursday at Dirty Frank's where we used to bitch about losing 8, 9, 10 years ago.

If you're in Philly, the 4/5 issue will be in newsboxes for a few more days. Or you can go read Willenborg's story, "Blackout" (an excerpt from his novel) here. You can find my poem on the citypaper site, too, but the formatting is messed up, so just scroll down this blog to Feb 11, boom, winner. Some nice chance overlap between the story and poem.

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PS - a facsimile of the paper. Click and flip to page 18: