dean young poems - LET ME TYPE THEM TO YOU

ON BEING ASKED BY A STUDENT IF HE
SHOULD ASK OUT SOME GIRL

I say get her alone in a kitchen.
I say what Keats said.
I say don't wear that. I display the driftwood
you picked up at McClure's the day we saw the whale.
Part question mark, part claw, part stroke
personified. I say buy her a box of crayons,
the big 64 box. I say you'll be dead soon
anyway. Outside the snow hesitates and thaws
but my office has no windows. I say my office
has no windows and down the hall
the copy machines moan, Again, again,
my chair all swiveling squawk.
I say when I was young.
I tell about carrying your chair across the bridge
and how sick your cockatoo seemed the first weeks
in our new apartment. I say we'll be dead soon
anyway. I explain how after looking half the afternoon
for two socks, one mine, one yours, we find them
under a pillow, nestled together like newts in love.
I say it's hopeless as holding a bag of strawberries
in the rain. I mean what happens to wet paper bags.
I say climb the mountain. I read some Donne aloud
like I'm paid to do. I move the triangle
toward the furnace as indication of the indeterminacy
of all human affairs. There is no triangle, there is no
furnace. I say when I was alone
and miserable. I let the canoe stutter
and drift. I lift my hands like someone asked to dance
a dance I don't know how to. I have this pain.
I have died this way in a previous life,
my armor clattering in the dust.
It's spring in the Alps. On Venus it's Spring
and tiny Venusians chortle with sobs far beyond
our registers, inventing new forms of love.
I ask her name. I say spell it. I ask, What
did you get on the midterm? Across the hall,
my colleague explains something 18th century
to a cloud of perfume. I am thinking
this morning to discard the opera,
wrote John Cheever in his journal.
To find out why life has this huge dog,
wrote Vallejo in Spanish in Paris.
He fell over coughing up blood.
If I had my notebook, I'd cross everything out.
I love the sea, how it crosses everything out.
I almost start talking about Wisconsin.
I say, You can do two things, maybe three.
I say the final's on Monday,
mostly short answer, some i.d.

Arts of Camouflage

After years of walking funny,
of sleeping sideways like a shrub,
of trying to transform myself into a panther,
the morning I woke transformed into a panther
wasn't all that different from waking transformed
into a jellyfish, dune grass, into nothing at all.
Same sun in the eyes, same clouds bleeting
like lambs, bleeting like lions eating lambs,
same stupid choice of shirts:
blue or brown
would I be hiding in sky or ground
which finally didn't matter much
because I tore them all apart. This was in '42.
We felt pretty routy in '42.
There was the war. There was stacking stuff
upon the endless courseways. Nobody was eating
chocolate, then suddenly chocolate was okay.
There was deferment, inkblots, obscure
forestries. The Effort. Kids today,
they look at a rock and think nothing,
think a rock can't just rise up and smote.
There wasn't all this equipment you see advertised
even in commercials about killing ants.
Still we carried plenty.
Detonators. French letters. Atropine.
Philosophy tracts. A thing is never fully itself
but often talks to itself in code.
You'd dream you were surrounded by torn-open bodies
and wake up surrounded by torn-open bodies until
the spiritual seemed a preferable dwelling
but purely in a terrifying manner like a leaf
falling from a tree or a stranger
speaking your name.
Sure, I believe in life after death,
it's just that this life after death
is so much like the last one, no one notices
they've already died bunches of times. Same
trenches. Corrosive fogs. Same protective coatings
nearly impossible to get off and when you do,
you've damaged what's inside. Actually I never
changed into a panther. I just said that
to get your attention like someone yelling Fire
when there's really not even a spark,
in fact it's rained solid for weeks.

Lives of the Noncombatants

Poor Lorca, all those butterflies
in his bulletholes and there's only
one lousy stranger to throw dirt on him.
When the Falange threatened to set fire
in his home, the stranger volunteered
to save his children, each shovelful
doesn't fall on a daughter, each clod bouncing
in an open eye unearths a son.
There's a song that can't be translated.
The stars in it make no sense
but are very bright. We knock
at the window, we knock at the wind.
God shoots up her hand then pulls it back,
the question's not what she thought
was being asked. We knock at the door,
the ceiling, the floor, the century.

Poor Lorca, what a sissy, his whole life
he knew this was coming and still
he looks like an idiot, suddenly
he stops defanging the piano in his underwear
and gets all morbid, embarrassing the diplomats.
He asks his parents for more memory
for a silver pant leg, wristwatches
to fill a fishbowl and then he turns around
and puts tar in his hair. His stage directions
call for a rain of stiff white gloves.
You know what it's like to be wakened
by dogs, don't you? What it's like
to drop a couple thousand feet?
You know what a shovel is, don't you?
The only way we can withstand his berries
is by boiling them in an iron pot
then straining the mush through a cloth
and throwing away what comes through
and throwing away what's left then
wrapping the cloth around our heads
and even then our dreams will almost kill us.

This man has been beaten about the face and head by an inflated pig's bladder and it is obviously tragic.

Whale Watch

Sometimes you may feel alone and crushed
by what you cannot accomplish
but the thought of failure is a fuzz
we cannot rid ourselves of
anymore than the clouds can their moisture.
Why would they want to anyway?
It is their identity and purpose
above the radish and radicchio fields.
Just because a thing can never be finished
doesn't mean it can't be done.
The most vibrant forms are emergent forms.
In winter, walk across the frozen lake
and listen to it boom and you will know
something of what i mean.
It may be necessary to go to Mexico.
Do not steal tombstones but if you do,
do not return them as it is sentimental
and the sentimental is a larval feeling
that bloats and bloats but never pupates.
Learn what you can of the coyote and shark.
Do not encourage small children
to play the trombone as the shortness
of their arms may prove quite frustrating,
imprinting a lifelong aversion to music
although in rare cases a sense of unreachability
may inspire operas of delicate auras.
If you hook, try to slice.
I have not the time to fully address
Spinoza but put Spinoza on your list.
Do not eat algae.
When someone across the table has a grain of rice
affixed to his nostril, instead of shouting,
Hey, you got rice hanging off your face!
thereby perturbing the mood
as he speaks of his mother one day in the basement,
brush your nose as he watches
and hidden receptors in the brain
will cause him to brush his own nose
ergo freeing the stupid-looking-making rice.
There is so much to say and shut up about.
As regards the ever-present advice-dispensing susurration
of the dead, ignore it; they think everyone's
going to die. I have seen books with pink slips
marking vital passages
but this I do not recommend
as it makes the book appear foolish
like a dog in a sweater.
Do not confuse size with scale:
the cathedral may be very small,
the eyelash monumental.
Know yourself to be made mostly of water
with a trace of aluminum, a metal
commonly used in fuselages.
For flying, hollow bones are best or
no bones at all as in the honeybee.
Do not kill yourself.
Do not put the hammer in the crystal carafe
except as a performance piece.
When you are ready to marry,
you will know but if you don't,
don't worry. The bullfrog never marries,
ditto the space shuttle
yet each is able to deliver its payload:
i.e. baby bullfrogs and satellites, respectively.
When young, fall in and out of love like a window
that is open and only about a foot off the ground.
Occasionally land in lilacs
or roses if you must
but remember, the roses
have been landed in many times.
If you do not surprise yourself,
you won't surprise anyone else.
When the yo-yo "sleeps", give a little tug
and it will return unless it has "slept" too long.
Haiku should not be stored with sestinas
just as one should never randomly mix
the liquids and powders beneath the kitchen sink.
Sand is both the problem and the solution for the beach.
To impress his teacher, Pan-Shan lopped off
his own hand, but to the western mind,
this seems rather extreme.
Neatly typed, on-time themes
strongly spelled are generally enough.
Some suggest concentrating on one thing
for a whole life but narrowing down
seems less alluring than opening up
except in the case of the blue pencil
with which to make lines on one side
of the triangle so it appears to speed through the firmament.
Still, someone should read everything
Galsworthy wrote. Everyone knows
it's a race but no one's sure of the finish line.
You may want to fall to your knees
and beg for forgiveness without knowing precisely
for what. You may have a hole in your heart.
You may solve the equation but behind it
lurks another equation. You may never get
what you want and feel like you're already a ghost
and a failed ghost at that, unable to walk through walls.
There will be a purple hat. Ice cream.
You may almost ruin the wedding.
You may try to hang yourself but be saved
by a kid come home early from school
or you may be that kid who'll always remember
his mother that day in the basement,
how she seemed to know he'd done something wrong
before he even knew
and already forgave him,
the way she hugged him and cried.
Nothing escapes damage for long,
not the mountain or the sky.
You may be unable to say why
a certain song makes you cry until
it joins the other songs,
even the one that's always going on
and is never heard, the one that sings us into being.
On the phone, the doctor may tell you to come in.
It may rain for three days straight.
Already you've been forgiven,
given permission. Each week, cryptograms
come with the funny papers.
You're not alone.
You may see a whale.

AFTER 8 BEERS, I RISE INTO THE
TURBULENCE

Pittsburgh airport, early winter, my plane
socked in and the first two beers, 2.50 per,
I try to drink slow. The receipts tag the clock
precisely: 7:54, 8:18 so I could be sipping

time itself, lapping all the numbing events
puddled in the news like a shade of Hell
guzzling goat's blood. Down the hatch
to John Lennon shot, gulp goes the baby stuck

in the storm pipe, swallow hard for all those
hostages going down sideways. On TV a blizzard too,
two teams skate furiously one red, one black
like warring ants, the puck obscured in the down-

and up- and overpour so there's nothing
to connect the surge and combat to except
the idea of a puck which always comes too late.
8:38. I've not nearly had enough and

the guy next to me, also stuck, piling up
a thicket of plastic swords, shows me a picture
in one of the flesh magazines you have to reach
way back for: the girl in a froth

of stuffed animals, shucked, clutching a giraffe.
My daughter, he says although I don't believe him.
The expression on her face is not a look a father
should ever see, step or otherwise. And his face?

Maybe he's already turned to stone, maybe
he's spat out as much as he can and flies
from runway bar to runway bar like a man
trapped in an early Twilight Zone, hunting

for someone to set him free, unburden him,
someone who'll say Oh yeah, this is my son
on page 23, my wife on the trapeze, here's Mom
on the leash. Maybe I'm as dead as my Dad,

maybe my plane's already crashed and what
we're dealing with is a bunch of ghosts
trying to wash out the last gristle of their
earthly lives, what's stopping us from rising

in an ectoplasmic burn-off. He probably didn't
believe me either when I said I was going
from one funeral to another, that last bit
just to keep things lively. But it was snowing

too hard to be Hell and the music told us
we'd better not cry and I just swallowed,
didn't say much more, just fluttered his magazine,
recognized no one, read the columns about

people having sex in grocery stores, tollbooths,
airplane washrooms, places you'd think utterly
incommodious, hostile to whatever it is
we work so hard to give and take from and to each other.

Ten Inspirations

1
You decide to make soup.
You do not have any carrots or onion.
Any celery or chicken or leaves.
You have water and salt though.
Boil ten minutes. Serve.
And afterwards this simple soup
may be used to wash your face.

2
You decide to make a masterpiece.
You do not have any paints or thorns,
any genius or paper, any pianos
or sticks or rubber.
You have air though.
No doubt about it,
a masterpiece.

3
You decide to make a god.
Don't have no commandments,
no Renaissance altarpieces, no
relics, tax-sheltered televangelists,
funny hats.
You do have yourself.
Wow, gods act like Walt Whitman.

4
You decide to tell your sweetheart
how much you like humping him or her
but even as you're coming,
his/her nipples stiff as pearls
under your palm, you know
there's something deeper you love.

5
You decide to make a flower.
You don't have any seeds, bees,
bat guano, engravings, pitchforks,
sunshine, scarecrows.
You have a feeling though.
Presto.

6
You decide to make a gift.
You have artificial eyes, education,
lightweight wing material,
electricity, sugar, chlorophyll,
a bedroom, doo-wop.
I can't wait.

7
You decide to make a moon
then realize you don't have room
anywhere to put it.
One moon will have to provide
enough rhyming opportunities.

8
You decide to make a suspension bridge.
You look through a toilet paper tube.
You have the day off.
Call Tony but he's on his way to the Cape.
Watch a TV show about paratrooping supermodels.
Wipe gunk off a surface.
Your cat tells you it's dinnertime
but it's only three o'clock.

9
You decide to make a match.
Don't have any sulfur
or magnesium. No striking surface,
accelerant or slogan. You give up
and sleep and a bride-sized spark plug
tells you to look within.
There's a sea horse.

10
You are in your pajamas
eating cold pizza
when you decide to make a coyote.
Now all you need is a pregnant coyote.

ROTHKO'S YELLOW

What I don't understand is the beauty.
The last attempts of the rain, my shoulders
aching from all afternoon with the ladders
and the hour with her. I watch the rainbow
until I have to focus so hard I seem
to create it. Thinking of her watching
this storm, wanting him. This lightning.
This glut in the gutters. Now only
the yellow left. Now the blue
seeped out. The purple gone. The red
gone. People downstairs playing Bach,
the quiet attenuated Bach. She must
have tried and tried. The holes drilled in.
The small man in the movie who looked
like laughter would kill him. The carnation
farmer who left snared birds for the woman
he loved. Who would hang himself after
stitching her ribbon to his chest,
What I don't understand is the beauty.
I remember the theatre in Berkeley where
we sat eating cucumbers, watching the colossal
faces played over with colossal loss.
I would get off early and meet her outside,
her hair always wet. All last night
I listened to the students walk by until 3,
only the drunk left, the rebuffed and
suddenly coupled. What did I almost
write down on the pad by my bed
that someone lowered me into my sleep? One morning
when she and I still lived together,
the pad said only, cotton. Cotton.
Sometimes it's horrible, the things said
outright. But nothing explains the beauty,
not weeping and shivering on that stone bench,
not kneeling by the basement drain.
Not remembering otherwise, that scarf she wore,
the early snow, her opening the door
in the bathing light. She must have tried
and tried. What I don't understand is the beauty.

somehow it's not the greatest discovering them this way, not compared to how i've discovered others

i like it

big fan of dean young over here

wow i love (some of, a lot of) this!

I have skid u can borrow

yes please

First You Must

Before the abstract cone enfiladed
in blue enthusiasms, you must learn
to draw a tree that looks like a tree.
But first you must study bark
at the Institute of Bark in Amsterdam.
You must learn the woody organelles in Dutch
although first you must be immunized.
Luckily this is not the 14th century
and you are not trying to become a doctor of the throat
as you would have only the bodies of hanged thieves
to cut apart and hanging makes a mess
of the mechanisms of the throat. Hope
may be depicted as a cinder block wrapped
in aluminum foil which is pretty
rotten luggage. First you'll
fall in love with what you can't
understand. The baby ram butts the shiny tractor.
Nothing you draw looks like anything else.
First you must build a cathedral of toothpicks.
Write nothing but sonnets for a year.
The error is not to fall but to fall
from an ungreat height. First you must fall
for the girl like you on the boat
seeming to leave all she knows but also
unlike you in some important, not only
glandular, ways. The days grow short, icier,
the heart like a ram in a field surrounded by electric
wire. The single tree there in the wind
not looking much like a tree, full
of withered fruit vexed with caterpillars.
It resembles a tragic wig.
No verse is actually free.
Before oils, charcoal. First you must go
to Vermeer's birthplace. Bed linens crusty,
widows a-wink with all you do not know
like a horrible disease lurking in the genes.
I must know, you shout, shaking the girl hard.
This is a mistake. What she first thought
was your handsome intensity, she now thinks
is insanity. First you must be forgiven.
Before being a human being, you must be
a zygote. Ditto a horse, a ram, an alligator.
The tractor comes into the world from a pit of fire
like the trombone. Better that you have failed.
The girl hurries off in a form of native dress
you know not the word for. The test returns
with a big red X. Before watching the sun set
into the ocean of tears, you must study
optics. Sir Isaac Newton knew a lot about optics
before he knew a lot about gravity and orbits.
What will make the girl return? And you call
yourself an artist. First you must suffer,
first the form in duplicate. Before the form,
the pre-form. Before crying forlorn, forlorn,
rigor mortis. Before tacking the nude,
you must work for months with wooden blocks.

Believe in Magic?

How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator aside.
Seen lipstick on a wineglass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls have minds.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we're surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard's bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nonetheless.
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flame gets close
to your fingers until all your holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That's how I feel now.

you can almost read that one to the tune of Lovin Spoonful - Do you Believe in Magic lol

I have 'Bender', and for some reason it did nothing for me. But reading the stuff here I keep finding stuff I like. Maybe I should revisit it.