#wakoski

[velvet-thoughts-and-honey]

-Diane Wakoski, “Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons”

[fleetling]

I rode by your window, hoping you would see me and want me / not knowing you already had a guest.

Diane Wakoski , from “Apparitions Are Not Singular Occurrences“

[saobvi]

Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch

"Estabas destinado para mí,

Y he sobrevivido,

¡Qué Dios te maldiga!

Al final voy a bailar sobre tu tumba,

Viejo,

Voy a aprender cada danza tradicional

Y bailaré una y otra vez sobre tu tumba,

Un paso

Por cada vez

Que me hiciste mal"

-DIANE WAKOSKI.

[bachtiwords]

Richard Maxfield lives (after Diane Wakoski)

If I cough right now someone might record it but it won't be Richard Maxfield For these times are the future And these times are different

If I cough right now I might as well jump out of the window Sabotage myself Or stay at home, they say

Which is why I'm writing this in an empty park which I broke into which someone else has broken into before me Richard Maxfield would approve

And he likes our coughs And I miss someone who likes my coughs And I miss the trees the emptiness in this mythology

And, I tell you, animals are stunned A lizard in my path an ant on my leg staring suspensively Not sure if they missed me

I remain unmoved because who knows when Richard Maxfield will blow his head off until it all falls apart 'Better stock up for the future'

Hey

Hey

It was not music It was your cough "If you cough very hard do you think you fall apart?"

It was not music But I heard the missing note Richard you poor old bugger These times are different In these times You live on

After:

Diane Wakoski

The Story of Richard Maxfield

He jumped out of a window. Or did he shoot himself? Was there a gun or was it pills? Did anyone see blood? Was he holding water in his lungs? Or was he right about the CIA conspiracy and killed by one of them because he knew their plan?

Richard was an electronic composer. He wrote a piece called ‘Cough Music’ made up of the coughs of hundreds of people at concerts. He was brilliant and well organized. And then he fell apart. He was homosexual and took drugs. He was brilliant and well organized. I loved ‘Cough Music’ and could not see how such a fine composer could fall apart as Richard fell apart.

This is the story of Richard Maxfield. He died in California. It does not make me as sad that he died as that he fell apart. We all die. We do not all fall apart. ‘Cough music’ was a beautiful piece of music.

                                               I went to a concert tonight and heard many people coughing, especially during the encore, which was a piano piece by Debussy, delicate and sparse, like a dress you can see through, and everyone seemed to have to cough during the piece.

If you cough very hard, do you think you fall apart? I once had a bad cough and now realise that for two weeks I coughed during every poetry reading and concert I went to. I wonder if anyone recorded my cough? I wonder how many readers and performers not only did not feel sympathetic towards my bad lungs and the symptomatic cough but also wanted to shoot me for coughing? A fortuneteller once said I would die of TB. I wonder if that’s why I like ‘Cough Music’?                                                                Perhaps I should have my lawyer write into my will                      “I would like to have ‘Cough Music’ played at my funeral. Someone would think that in bad taste. No one likes to think that after you die you still have bad taste, Even if you had it in life.

What bothered me about Richard Maxfield was that he had the bad taste to fall apart; dying after you fall apart is actually a rectification of bad taste. Richard was so brilliant and well organized I could not imagine how he fell apart. And ‘Cough Music’ is just one of his very beautiful concrete tapes. They say the men he loved destroyed him. But he was brilliant and well organized and I find it hard to believe some not-brilliant and poorly organized man could destroy him.

You see, the story of Richard Maxfield is one I do not understand. But I have always loved ‘Cough Music’ and when I heard the beautiful Debussy tonight and thought of a man I love who for many reasons I cannot see or be with and I heard the audience coughing, flashing every once in a while like light catching a strip of aluminium which blows on a fruit tree,

I understood that I would never fall apart, though I did not know why, and for a moment I thought of the involuntary action of coughing, and I understood perhaps why he jumped out of a window though I knew that just as I would never fall apart, I would also never jump out of a window, and I also refrained from coughing, though just at the end of the Debussy,              I wanted to/ maybe just to join the whole crowd.

There are many ways to die, but none of them is subtle.                                Why do people cough so much at concerts? I cannot touch the piano. I cannot touch you. If the King of Spain gave a concert no one woud cough. The story of Richard Maxfield is one I do not understand, but I thought of it tonight, listening to people cough their way through Debussy,

It was not music.

Only Richard Maxfield made music out of coughing, and he is dead. Richard Maxfield is dead.

[finished-rug]

I am trying to think how a woman can be a rock, when all she wants is to be soft, to melt to the lines her man draws for her. 

[finished-rug]

counsel me, I cannot cry anymore. I have been hardened, hurt, I am beyond love. I need your love. It is the only thing that keeps a woman alive, healthy, salty, salt in the wound. 

[batarde]

You never lose the sense of being an intruder.

Diane Wakoski, The Collected Greed: Parts 1-13.

[batarde]

Greed inches out of my mouth.

Diane Wakoski, "Greed, Part 1: Of Polygamy."