Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Tuesday 18 June 2013

Harris Schiff: New York


.
photo
   
An occupier on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012



If you are going to
         
            jump out the window

                                             please


                                                         please

            lemme go through your pockets first




Harris Schiff: New York, from One More Beat, 2012

photo

Yankee Stadium: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

photo

Memorial Day fireworks over Asbury Park oceanfront: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

photo

A tattered American flag: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

8 comments:

TC said...

Can it be the best poet-mind of my generation has been surviving on rice & beans (16 cents a pound) and bananas (3 for a dime) in certain Third World countries? (Hint, not including China or Switzerland.)

"Me, I have fallen totally out of the United States of America!"

Harris Schiff directs two new poems from the Planet of the Abused to us -- the We Who Are About To Die, If We Were Not In Fact Brain-Dead Already

TC said...

Oh, those spook contractors from the DC tech corridors must be looking for bargains in past-sell-by-date produce -- they were all over this one like fruit flies on bad bananas in a matter of moments. Happy encephalitis, guys! Quelle désillusion! There's No Escape from New York!

TC said...

(Not that they don't do great cover -- "just say Mark Zuckerberg sent you, knock three times, and invoke the Celestial Sanctity of the Office".)

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

"the visual mind is so much quicker than the eye"

6.18

light coming into sky above still black
ridge, bird slanting toward pine branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

“constant” of second member
complication, logical

problem of space, from form
the field, the system

blinding silver edge of sun above ridge,
fog on horizon to the left of the point

TC said...

Steve,

complication, logical

problem of space, from form
the field, the system

Yes, that's where all this plays out, exactly. And memory keeps it all green. That bright diamond, in the mind.

What else was poetry meant to be for, after all?

Mose23 said...

The reading: almost unbearably moving, a small tear in that seamless web (he says, thinking wishfully).

It's the please repeated that does it for me.

Nin Andrews said...

Yes, very powerful.

TC said...

Excellent to hear your thoughts, as always, Duncan and Nin.