ripped page before Election

non sequiteur in honor of the world's (Americentrically-speaking, that is), and a lifetime's most important election tomorrow, I will rip what I wrote yesterday on the plane, into this electronic format on the pixelled screen existing now. Think of it as July fireworks for the main event of Independence Day: showy, but utterly unrelated. Oh, and before I begin, since I imagine no one will finish through the ensuing jabber and continue--I have not written here for three months, it seems, and in that time much has gone on, and at the same time so little; I just got back from a trip back to Brown where the last time I was there was graduation & sadness & goodbyes: t'was a good good time, great to see old friends, and to meet new ones, as they say.

There's this exception then there's election

I get tripped in words

American Other
I/A walking pin-up board walks
crossing America
collecting pins

American Tuesday
Ruby Tuesdays; Tuesdays

with Morrie; I used to confuse

Tuesdays with Thursdays or

skip over one and come up with

6 days a week on the test.

American Poet

I just knew Shakespeare for most of school--
Then he wasn't even American--
And so ordered a used Frost book from web
Stranger America during college
(my first)--

And college befriended me Creeley--
who led me down B1 library level Olson and Pound and Duncan
and Levertov, and the
mighty man/words Creeley, whose humor whose
bareness of human
whose breathing
of America resembled
mine when I
spoke with him
every office hours and e-mail
Onward!,
best, Abe,
Robert, and
they are the
audible voice that plays, streaming from this reading;
that digitized collaboration:
they all were the breathing speakers of America
based on breath--

And elsewhere belatedly read Whitman
And Ginsberg and teh raging Ameriholic
And pieced in O'Hara (Frank) and Faulkner of the South
And the white whale swallowing it all--
And I continue on
with my own here
at this point