My New Blog Addy

On May 15th, 2011, I moved to Berlin, Germany. Info about that and other things is on my new wordpress blog. The addy is here: http://mppowers.wordpress.com/ -- It's also on the right. Come on over & check it out.

Vielen Dank!

Dufunct

This blog is pretty much defunct, but I'm going to leave it up for the hell of it. There are some decent postings in here, I think, but most of it was written hastily (off the cuff or on the wine) and should definitely not be taken too seriously. The best place to find me (for the threemenandamidget interested) is the the NYQ link to the right, where my new poems are always listed.

Thanks, and feel free to browse
this dump
at your unleisure.

MP Powers (powersUNDERSCOREmpATyahooDOTcom)

Ulrich Schnauss - Monday Paracetamol

Ulrich Schnauss - Between Us And Them (Far Away Trains Passing By LP)

I predict the next Beethoven/Bach is gonna be a German of the Schnauss variety...

Ulrich Schnauss - Suddenly the trees are giving

fact

the back of no one's head is wise

Erik Satie

Listening to Erik Satie's Gymnopedie, which is (almost) every bit as brilliant as Moonlight Sonata, I have a bottle of Spanish wine beside me, and I'm feeling a little flowereaten - my skin itches a little bit. I take a sip of the red, go back to the first song, which is really the soul singing, or speaking, as dusk takes the streets and the trees outside my window, and another radio plays in the other room. The voices of people drift up from downstairs, someone is standing in the hallway, a telephone rings. There's an immense weight pressing down on me, and I don't expect it will ever go away, the smuttiness of things past, regret, the people -- why is it suffering always seems to involve someone else? and joy? joy is best when it's shared, of course. Joy and suffering - borne of the people... and the sound of Gymnopedie, borne of a piano, and of the soul, and when I listen to it I know, the soul is sad, and beautiful in its sadness, and it will keep going on that way, beautifully. Sad.

(the above is a pic i took from a dock in key west, nov '09 - i've decided to put more pics in here because i think the artwork ran its course, for now, and sometimes tends to bore more than real life scenes - still haven't figured out how to get the comments right... one of these days i will have comments, i swear... anyway, back to crying in my wine -- "no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader...")

Beelzebubstomp

Above is Miami on a cloudy Saturday afternoon (photo taken on the Julia Tuttle Causeway @ 70mph), and below is something that was published in A Cappella Zoo (April 2010)

Beelzebubstomp

In rosedusk, when the sky is littered with crows; when all the world's mad and mulish brutalities abound and you've scrapheaped hope and your soul's hiding somewhere in the cracks of your sofa; if your mirror makes rank complaints about the face in it, and you feel like every crumpled lottery ticket in the world, hang your name on a cliché. It's not a question of whichwhat or rightwrong, whywhere or whether the rightbrain seizes what the lefthand knows. The elephant will never shuffle out of the room for you, and wounded is the color of its languor. For this unspooling, precisely not improbable lie, which is life, it's a question of posies and perpetual changelings. Blueruin and a borrowed dialect, the drowsy rings of Lethe. It's not a question of whether or why the ghosts grieve in trees of the evening. The cruel ornaments of Spring; bells, halls, mills, hells, lovers frisking up the peachblue cobblestones of Montmartre. Occidental neopreacher's goatfooted rooftopspeeches warmed with the bluidtinged fruitwine of hate. Nightornoonday, spirits in graveyards coalesce, polliwogs girdlehurtle. Is that a merely man or mostly a noun? It's not a question answerable by the mouth of any cyberterranean quasidemocracy, or that which sells off its own superficial "ideals" as if they were a bundle of flameretardant socks. Simply yes certainly quite commonly understood, the wherefores and the ways the world suffers under the weight of the same old unrealities. Down at the heel and up against the wall, over the hill and under the gun. The lusty living things, lovethighs and paltryprinces, blind matter whirling chaotic. It's not the answer, but the question eternal: when your nightdreams lose their dances, will the djinns still sing for you?

Happy 2010!

Everybody wants to live high up in the music. ~ Various

Koln & Paris

<--- Here's Montmartre, and here's a poem derived from my ill-famed trip to Europe. So far I have gotten four poems out of the trip, but I have several others in me. I have to have them in me. The vacation cost me about $3000... that's $750/poem. Ridiculousness. Esp. b/c I am going bankrupt.

1.)

Nightmusic (1st Published in Rusty Truck -- June 2010)

On a dingy corner across from the Moulin Rouge, this little beautiful madam takes my hand and draws me into the sadistic darkness of her strange ambrosial cave. S’asseoir.” I sit down on a fat sofa. “Something to drink, monsieur?” “Heineken, please…” Smoke tingles in a soft blaze of soiled lights, walls aquiver. A big, buxom African whore in clinging semitransparent lingerie moves under the chanting red globes. Something begins to diminish. The decomposing dribble of a moment jiggles via the infallible hands of timelessness, perhaps?

Here, the dead have dressed up in their oral traditions, god plays grim his violin, light fails, and the prostitutes hit the floor, shoving precisely though the pushandpull of orchestral despair, their bounding feet transfigured on a steep current of swollen logic. It sits at the end of some foreign tongue, volumes of dirty eroticism slowly expanding until the keen queen-of-all-kings coyly emerges. She hurls a handful of lilacs on the floor, spits, and as she begins pouncing on them with her happy jouncing feet, I observe the glad awful screaming of her profane flesh; the sweaty waves of palpitating flab among whose largeness even oblivion would be feign to blush. My beer arrives, green and glowing. It’s handed to me by some Turkish pimp of the dime-a-dozen kind, donned in large white collars and a black bullying blazer stuffed with shoulders, his gold tooth and earrings emitting sharp glints from the hellish neon, his face a dull retching of perfect
evil, like a serpent, or a toadstool. His loafer slightly pronounces itself, he pirouettes, one arm does a fat sweeping gesture, and the big African whore descends upon me, pink drink in hand. The pimp nods, nods again. “For the lady,” he says. “Merci…” she says. “On me?” I ask.

But he’s gone.

A cloud of silence covers her face. Immense, beautiful, perfectly insipid. She takes a sip from the straw. Two hungry thighs squirm before me and she unleashes her top. She cups the roundness of her heaving breasts and gives them a good upward squeeze, lets go. Plunk. Then her fingers find my thighs and I feel like all the others, hooked in the gill, waiting to be dragged along the wake and then eaten. The room spins its fuzzy red syllables. A purple curtain parts. A man in a cape begins to sob. Or sing. Or something. And I am the man in the cape. I have no home. Just this perverse little cave of a room, in my soul, or across from the Moulin Rouge, where a purple curtain closes, and gods play grim their violins.