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Jet Wimp reads new poems

 

If funny and witty had to arm wrestle with surrealism and reality for the right to be a Jet Wimp poem, they would struggle, elbows on the table forever going from the big picture down to the tiniest significant details, which some say God is in, and some say it’s the Devil, but I say it’s Jet Wimp who’s in the details. His poems do more than focus, they observe and pronounce the right words perfectly; clearly they are there to see. I’ve enjoyed Jet’s work since I moved to Philadelphia in the 1970s when he was one of the movers and shakers in the phenomenal poetry scene that was happening then.

In February, he sent me two poems via email. After a long hiatus—we are talking years, if not decades, I was happy to read a poem Jet had written. This week, I took a train to Philadelphia to record him, my first time out of New York in over a year. In the Vimeo below, Jet reads some new poems. Enjoy.

 

 

 

Here are the two poems Jet sent to me in February. He doesn’t read them in the Vimeo.

 

Darwin’s children

     Manhunter, a film directed
           by Michael Mann

in this movie the
blind woman is leaning
over an anesthetized
Bengal tiger
her right hand navigates
its stripes  the rich
unloosened flames  its
man-vexed claws are
shuttered  its eyes lazy
as an old clock.  and
hers  eclipsed in wonder
as she soaks her
small hand in the
forest of its breathing

this is what the sweet
gas tells her: 100,000,000
years ago they would
have been lovers  the
same dawn sheathing
them in black and
yellow  now her deft

touching is a song to other-
ness and all its

shaggy sleep  her
kiss  erotic but not
coming from the
groin  meets the
smoke of that always
leaving just
arriving
journey  whose
tracks no hunter
will ever
find

 


Rescuer

I surface from an insulin

delirium  still wrist-
cuffed  sauced with a ghost
coverlet  more sheet
than blanket  the head nurse
is a gnome  scuttling
across the ward floor  left to

right once  twice  three
times  stooped  head averted like the
crone on the Dutch Cleanser
can clack  clack  clack
her heels bound across
the white tiles

I thirst  I want to scurry
up an orange tree  tearing at
fruit  to bob forever in
sweetness  quick!  this woman
isn’t breathing!  someone

shouts  machines trundled
in and out  nurses  “Ralph!”     I
shout: “let me up  I
can do CPR!”
no Jet  the orderly
calls  everything’s
under control

“but I can help!”  I
whine  jiggling my
cuffs  “I know how
to help!”

 

 

 

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