Five Poems about Laura Yes Yes
Poet Laura Yes Yes was scheduled to come in last night as a featured poet. At about 2:20 pm she informed me she couldn't make it (weather at airport), which was sad, but completely understandable. As much as I hate flying? You KNOW if I was somewhere in an airport with some weather going on I'd have been like, "I'm never writing another poem again." So now she’s Laura No No (a joke I’m sure she never gets tired of).
Anyhow, I still wanted our folks to have something cool, so I took it upon myself to write a feature's worth of poems all about Laura Yes Yes.
Because I don't actually know Laura that well, I didn't want to try to craft five poems by Scott Woods extolling the virtues/tearing down the walls of Laura Yes Yes, so I decided to do them in the voice of other poets: Bill Campana, Saul Williams, Billy Collins, every other slam poet at a National Poetry Slam, and of course, Laura herself.
This is not a book; this journal entry IS the book. I haven’t printed it out or anything, and don’t plan to. It’s just one of those Evel Knievel projects that make me Scott Woods, son. They're a lot of fun to read out loud in the voice of the "authors".
All of these poems were written between 2:25 pm and 6:55 pm Wednesday, October 14, 2009 (yesterday) before open mic. Feel free to print them out, keep them, bind them, whatever. It’s a free chapbook basically, except you do the chapping. Really, the most awesome thing in the world would be if people printed them out, took them to her features and had her sign them. How weird would that be? How cool? Very, I think.
You’ll see lots of references to hair and mulattoisms and yellow chicks. I never do these things because they are 100% true, but because they are good theater. (Of course, if Laura IS a mulatto, then I’m even cooler than I thought. Vernell seems to think so and she would know, not because she is a mulatto, but because I have been saying she is for years until she conceded her VERY LINEAGE TO MY RACIST WILL IN THE INTEREST OF WORLD PEACE. So if having world peace means you catch some Denise Huxtable jokes now and then, tough.)
Enjoy!
1. WANDERLUST
(Bill Campana)
To have laid in the Arizona sun on a
potato-baked rock shaped like an otter
is how you get that way.
You get the wanderlust in you
and the coyotes come from miles around on golf carts,
wielding wooden spoons doused in tapioca pudding,
or what passes for it on a potato-baked rock on Wednesdays.
That sound? That is the sound of golf carts
whizzing in your direction,
a sting of the western in their eyes.
It’s the kind of glint you used to get shot for in this town.
Now it’s just good morning.
Good morning BOB DOLE!
Have you heard of the sun-burned beauty that swears
by the telephone pole lines of the road?
Who burns the way a good rum burns,
all piratey, dug out of an island, an earth pimple,
and chugged in the glint of sunrays.
It’s the kind of glint you used to get stranded for in this ocean.
Now it’s just “parlay”.
And the potato-baked rock is not a potato,
nor is it a rock, nor is it poetry.
It is the gripping salutation of Bob Dole latching
Larry King’s ham-fisted Deuteronomy that says,
“I have seen that place, old friend,
and whatever it has to say, it can say it to my face.”
And what a pretty face it is.
Old, and filled with coyotes with a 12 handicap,
but pretty nonetheless.
Thank you!
2. SPACE NAPS
(Saul Williams)
It is hair like the universe would wear if shorn from bodegas past Mars,
locking, interweaving pathways that bind time in rhymes.
I have seen the revolution in HD:
it was as still as Easter Island heads sporting dreads that dread man.
Dreading man locks into an uncivil prospect,
battoning space off of the orbits of curly-headed Venuses that trek through the night and speak verses.
Space flight is dreaded, worrisome naps bunching up at the river of your mind,
turning over space maps in the shape of your hippie ways.
For the meek, you sure do wrangle asteroids in your belt with some ease.
Time flees, as we wonder what the glee club on Pluto thinks now that it’s been evicted.
Planetary love restricted, Cornucopius lifted, a scripture written on the face of Jupiter like an afronaught exploding.
Naps everywhere!
New jacks running scared,
wondering where their bling has gone.
Wondering where the whale song will guide them next,
which treasure shall we wring around our necks.
I’ma wear you.
Strands so groovy I don’t have to lock it.
Ghost ride the whip with the door open, I don’t lock it.
The green be calling me and I answer but don’t knock it.
Let us all consider mercury’s finish,
it’s glaze, red for days, atmospheric changes ride the universe for days.
Amazed, I stand at the shores of Andromeda,
launching paper hats shaped like sailboats stolen from moats, breaking its surface.
Cosmic intellectualism at your service.
Burning sensation in your ears if you heard this. I’m nervous.
Tyson got the whole cosmos on notice / if you know this then
clap your hands,
or rather your flippers:
dolphins fittin’ to be them astrological niggas.
It’s good that your hair falls like that,
ocean spray, set the revolution off like that.
When the storm comes and hip-hop loses its training wheels
you’ll be the queen of the constellation wave and the electric eel.
It’s mad wavy.
Hair like interstellar gravy.
Running combs through it, you crash the shores, unmoor the whores
and let loose the floorboards.
Every man is an island. Mine bear coconuts and rum on Thursdays.
Your hair makes me seasick.
I lose myself in the back of your neck.
You are a mermaid that swims in words.
Sinking ships along your way.
3. YELLOW MORNINGS
(Billy Collins)
The morning is an especially interesting time
when you think about it,
and I happen to have thought about it,
as it turns out.
When necessary, I have thought about it with some gravity,
sitting fully into a chair until the cushion huffed out its discontent,
rapping my elbow on a wooden arm.
And how does one do that, exactly?
Rap an elbow on an arm?
Maybe waltz an ankle on a leg?
Perhaps salsa a lip on a mouth,
corn chips rolling about your tongue,
yellow, like an old lover who wrote poems
you didn’t like, or rather, whose poems you rather liked,
but rather she couldn’t recognize as her own.
Or,
sometimes,
after a spell -
or an incantation,
but definitely not a ritual -
when the mood is right,
certainly almost just past then,
we can consider that maybe,
perhaps,
she just didn’t like my poems.
4. DENISE HUXTABLE
(Every other poet at a National Poetry Slam)
When I asked you to make me a shirt for my date
with Rochelle and you made me look like
a painting Picasso had a seizure on,
pockets spilling out of my torso like the cries of missing milk cartons,
eyeballs where buttons should be.
If our father ever stopped beating us, I’m sure you would have made
a beautiful dress.
But when I came storming into the hallway,
my sleeves melting into one another and my high-top fade
the only part of the ensemble that worked,
we caught ourselves too late.
We had awakened the ogre that was our father like a sunrise of
baby cries rising out of an orphanage of cancer victims.
An orphanage where the children are our grandparents who have cancer
and we have abandoned them in an orphanage-like place.
At sunrise.
If our mother ever stopped drowning her sorrows in blue bottles and
Brown Sugar panty hose, she may have realized that the victims
she needed to be representing were us.
Remember Rudy? How she used to smile whenever Bud came over
and played Monopoly until our eyes were as heavy as crocodile lids spilling tears of joy. Why? We never know. It’s just what crocodile tears do sometimes. Like shouting poets: it’s just what crocodile tears do sometimes.
And our childhood? Our childhoods are raped from us every day by running fathers and running uncles who run. A LOT.
Remember Sondra?
How she tried to marry a big man to get rid of the
daymares of our father touching her like daddy knows best.
Like he had three sons.
Like he was Mickey Jones of the Monkees.
Like we were Captain Kirk’s green ladies.
Remember how he put her on milk cartons, how we were all on milk cartons,
trying to grow up and become cows, provide our own milk,
not be strangled on cold wax boxes like DEAD BABIES.
Remember how he treated Elvin, how he treated Lamont.
You big dummy.
Wrong show.
Remember how he was a racist too and still voted for Bush.
If our father ever stopped loving us we would have become better children,
We could have made the lambs stop screaming,
We could have made the world a better place filled with pudding people,
flaunting our nebulous Picasso shirts and jazz collections
before the darkness overtook our lives AND our father,
who was still running, and running, while we were running,
trying to shove popsicle sticks into our pudding behinds.
We could have made the world a better place
one Picasso shirt at a time.
5. HUSBANDRY
(Laura Yes Yes)
Men are like horses; that’s why they call it husbandry.
And the best way to ride many of them at once is by coach.
I have tried to do it by saddle.
I am not that wide,
and to be honest,
most of them are only worth the whips.
I ride them hard,
turn them into machines, heart churners.
When I don’t look at them they wilt.
When I do, they burn.
Either way, they know where the trails go.
All they can think about is how I ride them,
how I bring myself onto their bodies and
twist them east and west,
dipping their noses into pools to drink,
pulling clusters and strands of my mane out of their own.
They get so caught up in my whispering they whinny
when I think of them,
asses in the cold, tied to posts,
bucking at the splay of my limbs in saloon windows.
I teach them how to be men from afar
so that when I am near, they know their gods have heard them.
Anyhow, I still wanted our folks to have something cool, so I took it upon myself to write a feature's worth of poems all about Laura Yes Yes.
Because I don't actually know Laura that well, I didn't want to try to craft five poems by Scott Woods extolling the virtues/tearing down the walls of Laura Yes Yes, so I decided to do them in the voice of other poets: Bill Campana, Saul Williams, Billy Collins, every other slam poet at a National Poetry Slam, and of course, Laura herself.
This is not a book; this journal entry IS the book. I haven’t printed it out or anything, and don’t plan to. It’s just one of those Evel Knievel projects that make me Scott Woods, son. They're a lot of fun to read out loud in the voice of the "authors".
All of these poems were written between 2:25 pm and 6:55 pm Wednesday, October 14, 2009 (yesterday) before open mic. Feel free to print them out, keep them, bind them, whatever. It’s a free chapbook basically, except you do the chapping. Really, the most awesome thing in the world would be if people printed them out, took them to her features and had her sign them. How weird would that be? How cool? Very, I think.
You’ll see lots of references to hair and mulattoisms and yellow chicks. I never do these things because they are 100% true, but because they are good theater. (Of course, if Laura IS a mulatto, then I’m even cooler than I thought. Vernell seems to think so and she would know, not because she is a mulatto, but because I have been saying she is for years until she conceded her VERY LINEAGE TO MY RACIST WILL IN THE INTEREST OF WORLD PEACE. So if having world peace means you catch some Denise Huxtable jokes now and then, tough.)
Enjoy!
1. WANDERLUST
(Bill Campana)
To have laid in the Arizona sun on a
potato-baked rock shaped like an otter
is how you get that way.
You get the wanderlust in you
and the coyotes come from miles around on golf carts,
wielding wooden spoons doused in tapioca pudding,
or what passes for it on a potato-baked rock on Wednesdays.
That sound? That is the sound of golf carts
whizzing in your direction,
a sting of the western in their eyes.
It’s the kind of glint you used to get shot for in this town.
Now it’s just good morning.
Good morning BOB DOLE!
Have you heard of the sun-burned beauty that swears
by the telephone pole lines of the road?
Who burns the way a good rum burns,
all piratey, dug out of an island, an earth pimple,
and chugged in the glint of sunrays.
It’s the kind of glint you used to get stranded for in this ocean.
Now it’s just “parlay”.
And the potato-baked rock is not a potato,
nor is it a rock, nor is it poetry.
It is the gripping salutation of Bob Dole latching
Larry King’s ham-fisted Deuteronomy that says,
“I have seen that place, old friend,
and whatever it has to say, it can say it to my face.”
And what a pretty face it is.
Old, and filled with coyotes with a 12 handicap,
but pretty nonetheless.
Thank you!
2. SPACE NAPS
(Saul Williams)
It is hair like the universe would wear if shorn from bodegas past Mars,
locking, interweaving pathways that bind time in rhymes.
I have seen the revolution in HD:
it was as still as Easter Island heads sporting dreads that dread man.
Dreading man locks into an uncivil prospect,
battoning space off of the orbits of curly-headed Venuses that trek through the night and speak verses.
Space flight is dreaded, worrisome naps bunching up at the river of your mind,
turning over space maps in the shape of your hippie ways.
For the meek, you sure do wrangle asteroids in your belt with some ease.
Time flees, as we wonder what the glee club on Pluto thinks now that it’s been evicted.
Planetary love restricted, Cornucopius lifted, a scripture written on the face of Jupiter like an afronaught exploding.
Naps everywhere!
New jacks running scared,
wondering where their bling has gone.
Wondering where the whale song will guide them next,
which treasure shall we wring around our necks.
I’ma wear you.
Strands so groovy I don’t have to lock it.
Ghost ride the whip with the door open, I don’t lock it.
The green be calling me and I answer but don’t knock it.
Let us all consider mercury’s finish,
it’s glaze, red for days, atmospheric changes ride the universe for days.
Amazed, I stand at the shores of Andromeda,
launching paper hats shaped like sailboats stolen from moats, breaking its surface.
Cosmic intellectualism at your service.
Burning sensation in your ears if you heard this. I’m nervous.
Tyson got the whole cosmos on notice / if you know this then
clap your hands,
or rather your flippers:
dolphins fittin’ to be them astrological niggas.
It’s good that your hair falls like that,
ocean spray, set the revolution off like that.
When the storm comes and hip-hop loses its training wheels
you’ll be the queen of the constellation wave and the electric eel.
It’s mad wavy.
Hair like interstellar gravy.
Running combs through it, you crash the shores, unmoor the whores
and let loose the floorboards.
Every man is an island. Mine bear coconuts and rum on Thursdays.
Your hair makes me seasick.
I lose myself in the back of your neck.
You are a mermaid that swims in words.
Sinking ships along your way.
3. YELLOW MORNINGS
(Billy Collins)
The morning is an especially interesting time
when you think about it,
and I happen to have thought about it,
as it turns out.
When necessary, I have thought about it with some gravity,
sitting fully into a chair until the cushion huffed out its discontent,
rapping my elbow on a wooden arm.
And how does one do that, exactly?
Rap an elbow on an arm?
Maybe waltz an ankle on a leg?
Perhaps salsa a lip on a mouth,
corn chips rolling about your tongue,
yellow, like an old lover who wrote poems
you didn’t like, or rather, whose poems you rather liked,
but rather she couldn’t recognize as her own.
Or,
sometimes,
after a spell -
or an incantation,
but definitely not a ritual -
when the mood is right,
certainly almost just past then,
we can consider that maybe,
perhaps,
she just didn’t like my poems.
4. DENISE HUXTABLE
(Every other poet at a National Poetry Slam)
When I asked you to make me a shirt for my date
with Rochelle and you made me look like
a painting Picasso had a seizure on,
pockets spilling out of my torso like the cries of missing milk cartons,
eyeballs where buttons should be.
If our father ever stopped beating us, I’m sure you would have made
a beautiful dress.
But when I came storming into the hallway,
my sleeves melting into one another and my high-top fade
the only part of the ensemble that worked,
we caught ourselves too late.
We had awakened the ogre that was our father like a sunrise of
baby cries rising out of an orphanage of cancer victims.
An orphanage where the children are our grandparents who have cancer
and we have abandoned them in an orphanage-like place.
At sunrise.
If our mother ever stopped drowning her sorrows in blue bottles and
Brown Sugar panty hose, she may have realized that the victims
she needed to be representing were us.
Remember Rudy? How she used to smile whenever Bud came over
and played Monopoly until our eyes were as heavy as crocodile lids spilling tears of joy. Why? We never know. It’s just what crocodile tears do sometimes. Like shouting poets: it’s just what crocodile tears do sometimes.
And our childhood? Our childhoods are raped from us every day by running fathers and running uncles who run. A LOT.
Remember Sondra?
How she tried to marry a big man to get rid of the
daymares of our father touching her like daddy knows best.
Like he had three sons.
Like he was Mickey Jones of the Monkees.
Like we were Captain Kirk’s green ladies.
Remember how he put her on milk cartons, how we were all on milk cartons,
trying to grow up and become cows, provide our own milk,
not be strangled on cold wax boxes like DEAD BABIES.
Remember how he treated Elvin, how he treated Lamont.
You big dummy.
Wrong show.
Remember how he was a racist too and still voted for Bush.
If our father ever stopped loving us we would have become better children,
We could have made the lambs stop screaming,
We could have made the world a better place filled with pudding people,
flaunting our nebulous Picasso shirts and jazz collections
before the darkness overtook our lives AND our father,
who was still running, and running, while we were running,
trying to shove popsicle sticks into our pudding behinds.
We could have made the world a better place
one Picasso shirt at a time.
5. HUSBANDRY
(Laura Yes Yes)
Men are like horses; that’s why they call it husbandry.
And the best way to ride many of them at once is by coach.
I have tried to do it by saddle.
I am not that wide,
and to be honest,
most of them are only worth the whips.
I ride them hard,
turn them into machines, heart churners.
When I don’t look at them they wilt.
When I do, they burn.
Either way, they know where the trails go.
All they can think about is how I ride them,
how I bring myself onto their bodies and
twist them east and west,
dipping their noses into pools to drink,
pulling clusters and strands of my mane out of their own.
They get so caught up in my whispering they whinny
when I think of them,
asses in the cold, tied to posts,
bucking at the splay of my limbs in saloon windows.
I teach them how to be men from afar
so that when I am near, they know their gods have heard them.