Andrei Codrescu – Keep the Sabbath With Me
Andrei Codrescu – Keep the Sabbath With Me
BERLIN CALLING
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-8:43

BERLIN CALLING

Komm, mach mal Licht, Damit man sehn kann
2
(This text is based on the audio transcript.)
There is this guy in Berlin, a publisher, who asked me for a little book. I wanted to test him, so I sent him poems I would not publish anywhere because no decent person would write poems like this. And he surprised me.

I mean, not only he liked them, but he read them so carefully that he copyedited and edited them.

So now I have this, oddly enough, this little book of a few poems that will go into a nice edition, accompanied by an artist, I don't know who, and be published in Berlin.

I thought in Berlin they might be able to take it, but I don't know -- how amazing that a man named Kevin Tosca, like the opera, who lives in Berlin, and I'm not even sure he's a native English speaker or another kind of English speaker, but could read so carefully and like so much these awfully offensive poems.

This guy, you know, he actually knows what he's reading.

Okay these poems may not be appropriate for anybody they weren't even for me, I wasn't going to publish them but then in the kind of obscenity that surrounds us they might sound actually a little bit luminous. 

The book is called Love and they're love poems, really.
love

they wore the same pair of panties 
handing them over to each other after sex 
to wear until they went to the laundromat.
years of back and forth panties 
frayed over time until only a single strand remained 
a filament from a wind-torn spiderweb 
long after the spider moved on
your panties win immigrant of the year


confess

When I recommend writers I never mention names I can’t pronounce. 
A lot of great writers and artists get no PR on account of this handicap. 
With good friends I sometimes garble them.
It is easier to remember titles. “Ashes and Diamonds” 
easily beats Andrejecuski or whatever his name is. 
My pseudonym has cost me millions!


new york date

beards come back when men are useless
eating out is expensive
dishes are small the food sucks
you want to save some for later
beards are takeout bags
an aftersex snack is what sex
is all about I empty my beard on you, darling!
isn’t a nite in new york worth living here for?
i wish i was a lesbian in 1968


parental advisory
all my poems carry one 

the vice president
a suit in mothballs at the back of the closet
waiting to be worn at the funeral


new york stories
for lynnea


new york agent

reasonableness written on her face
she reports writing a memoir of apple blossoms
in old new england summer with dirty harvard 
boys fresh from the charles river regatta

her voice layered with recent trace of big city girl
the heart in the foam of her latte no longer
sporting its heart she takes a well-bred sip

people love their memoirs
to sound like f.scott but the nuggets of wisdom
that came so easily to f.scott sound corseted 
and poured into jeans for this encounter

until now this was her life up from sarah lawrence
to the flatiron cubicle where she reads submissions
she will now take an author to lunch in a french bistro 
an italian count she hopes will whisk her to tuscany


freud fries in bar

the bartender is tender
he’ll be eaten if he’s real nice
and so will she 
she is real nice we hope 
she won’t be badly bitten
unless she likes that sort of thing 
most people really don’t but barflies are special
and butterflies are now rare
more rare than the manners of company men
eating their buffalo wings with knife & fork
pot has been legalized just in time
for the great confusion of genders
we will all become buttered barflies


hetero couplet by ac

a woman’s anger at a man will last two times
the number of years they’ve been together


hetero couplet by lv

genitals are not the progenitor of discord
viscerally playful tussles trump antiquated tropes


if hitler won

mobs of herzogs would be running around: 
every german man would be a percentage of herzog 
with a majority of hundred percenters


punctuation prevents punk situation
     -Tristan Codrescu

Poet, next time, use punk-tuation!
Was that worth two centuries of brawl
and a lifetime of worry?

birth dates emigration dates zeitgeists breaks wars
what is the plural of hiatus
illusions of freedom within where the holes of culture 
used to be now overgrown by words
tzara had good timing and the radical temperament of youth
fondane had bad timing and mistook culture for civilization
celan the silence after the apocalypse
only a few years separated them they were the same person
and each one was many persons an anthology of collective
gift and misfortune
tzara made a revolution 
fondane founded a posthumous critical industry 
tzara's good fortune was fondane's bad luck 

 
cavafy

without worshiping the hope of barbarians 
cavafy would have died of boredom 
and then they came hélas and they were worse
than the bourgeois in their cafe chairs
cavafy's profound ennui and unspent violence
fell to the blade of greater cosmic conformity
whose first victims where cultured jews
europe without jews was a nasty place a grimm 
fairy tale alexandria burning in real time
an  approximate home for l'homme approximatif 
a dueling ground for shadows
loving your murderer was such a christian thing 
even jesus had his doubts about it hence the fury
setting in motion the history of gangs 
monastic orders motor clubs dark gyms poetry circles  
even the smallest gang the cubists with only two core members 
lost count of suicides and murders 
to quarrel in the cafe for style is one thing
to kill your neighbors for dactyls another
to be a poet is to remember things that haven't yet
happened the unrequited wants of flesh 
require the burning of books a mixed olfactory

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