Flarf Festival 2008

FLARF IS LIFE

2008-04-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

2008 Holistic Expo & Peace Conference

THURSDAY, APR 24, 8:00 P.M., DIXON PLACE, 258 BOWERY, $8
Film, neo-benshi, and theater by:

Brandon Downing: Two new short films
Rob Fitterman: Film: Bisquick / Bismarck
Nada Gordon: Neo-benshi: "Uzumaki"
Mitch Highfill: Play: "The Secret History of the '60s"
Rodney Koeneke: Neo-benshi: "Mary Poppins"
Michael Magee: Play: "William Logan: A Sedentary Life"
K. Silem Mohammad & Gary Sullivan: Play: "Chain: A Dialog"
Kim Rosenfield: Neo-benshi: "Meglio Stasera / The Libido Theory"

FRIDAY, APR 25, 7:00 P.M., 300 Bowery, buzz "Sherry/Thomas," FREE
Publication party for new books and DVDs by:

Brandon Downing: Dark Brandon (DVD)
Mitch Highfill: Moth Light
Sharon Mesmer: Virgin Formica
K. Silem Mohammad: Breathalyzer
Mel Nichols: Bicycle Day
Rod Smith: Deed
Gary Sullivan: PPL in a Depot

SATURDAY, APR 26, 6:00 P.M., BOWERY POETRY CLUB, 308 BOWERY, $8
A Segue reading to benefit Bowery Arts and Sciences, featuring:

Shanna Compton
Katie Degentesh
Benjamin Friedlander
Drew Gardner
Nada Gordon
Mitch Highfill
Rodney Koeneke
Michael Magee
Sharon Mesmer
K. Silem Mohammad
Mel Nichols
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
James Sherry
Rod Smith
Christina Strong

With music by the Drew Gardner Orchestra and The Saw Lady. Hosted by Brandon Downing and Gary Sullivan.

This benefit reading will help keep Segue readings at an affordable $6.

A PRIVILEGE

2008-04-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

"And if I hear one more teenager
stand up in church and say,
'These people had so little,
and now I'm so thankful

"'I think I'm going to puke
the eyes of exploited workers
on an atlas
I'm so thankful now for all I have.'

"Society will be tired
of being nice someday.
People will forget
what people look like."

He took his teenagers
to a local homeless shelter
and told the director:
"I prefer clean toilets.

"If you want my teenagers
to clean toilets,
then they will clean toilets.
An accessible clean toilet is a privilege.

"The toilet should be dry and clean
and accessible by road from everywhere
and it should provide storage for the normally
difficult-to-store seasonal worker.

"Toilet security is an emergency
matter in that apocalyptic cavern,
where more and more mouths open up
and all the lost align their eyes and ears.

"Even if we do all become like animals
and our future is unearthed from ancient graves,
the height of the seat and the amount of turning
space within the stall still matter,

"just like food continues to be
taxable, even if there will be no evil,
because the more we advance, the more
letters we write." Experts all over the world

are thought to have become extinct,
so we will never know if honest, moral people
are truly conscious, or if it's just nerves:
either way, clean toilets change our hearts,

the heart belongs to u
and it fills with special warmth
better than a bed of roses
to invite the hard work into the toilet.

--Stan Apps

JAMES JOYCE GONE WILD!

2008-04-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

just imagine the look on Benjamin Franklin's face.
Put that in your Poor Richard's Almanac,
and smoke it!

Into the heavens and hells and boobs of forever!
Abraham Lincoln said. as he fell down. on Ben Franklin's mutilated corpse ... I think I could hook this Senate thing up, too.
My Interests are Boobs, big boobs, bigger boobs. and Ben Franklin.

My point exactly... where are the boobs?
Ben Franklin stripteases being historically accurate

"Me horny me love you long tim3e"

--Mel Nichols

RULES FOR DRINKING FORTIES

2008-04-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

Skip’s book highlights the people and events of the Hippy Movement
bitch stop calling me bitch you BITCH
when i woke up this morning there were six empty forties
It’s a great resource for hippies

If you could vote for every feelgood in the “Weird” category
Once the forties are empty, you can untape your hands
... in the 1970s...fundamentally a cultural rather than a political protest
Skip’s book highlights the people and events of the Hippy Movement

It’s a great resource for hippies
empty nesters in their late forties
We will be coming to Dallas this weekend
when I woke up this morning there were six empty forties

Skip’s book highlights people and events of the Hippy Movement
the term is generally seen as pejorative
Do you have sound on your Web pages?
Skip’s book highlights the people and events of the Hippy Movement

If you were drafted by the hippy movement or the military, what would you do?
Witch might shit out after six cans of creamed corn
Do you have sound on your Web pages yet?
i woke up this morning there were six empty forties

‘Newhart’ Sidekick Dies at 85
Many of the houses lay vacant and have so for years
Skip’s book highlights the people and events of the Hippy Movement
when i woke up this morning there were six empty forties

--Rodney Koeneke

YANKEE DOODLE FUCK MACHINE

2008-04-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

I am a robot and I'm angry at people
I'm not wasting a vacation on a Boy Scout jamboree
the songs I can play are "Fur Elise,"
"The Entertainer," "Fuck You Becky," and "I'm Not Gay"

Anne Murray is the ugliest boy
I have ever seen in my life
"he is optimistic that man will come out on top"
where the FUCK is my time machine

regardless of how "indisputable" it may seem
to the fags or Arabs or whatever
we all have to have banks and as such banks get
to fuck up politics in America and the world

"at night we ride through mansions of glory
in suicide machines ... and fuck them," Flaubert wrote
in his journal with a little riiipp! AUGH! whap whap
whap whap whap as he sat in his gold Rolls-Royce

poems from Kansas don't have to be that crazy
one of them is "Yankee Doodle," the other one isn't
then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride
keep your stick on the ice, go fuck yourself

there are over 100 words for "shit"
and only one for "fuck you"
and every one of the self-serve machines at Kinko's
is an Anne Of Green Gables pop-up dollhouse

--K. Silem Mohammad

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

2008-04-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

Fist me! Cried Frank O'Hara and I did, shoved my own
bio so far up there he saw stars, fuckers that is, like
the next generation who only wanted blowjobs in the
off hours while printing facsimiles of their assholes on
mimeo. There is one true god, and he is dead and his
name is not pounding into and into…yes Butterick,
there is a revisionist inside me bc you too, are a twat.
Name dropping swill of a…your portrait gives me
thought, like a cock hanging below the knees, even.
Command preparation H. We are, after all, elitist
brick upon brick upon what once was two scenes
but now conflated. But as all tricks, it was heartless
and demanded more of my time and energy than was necessary ...

--Christina Strong

WHY

2008-04-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

Stan is always horny, but he won't admit it.
He says it doesn't work for him
to say so on job interviews. Let him eat cake

off my tongue I say
sooner or later
he'll get it, I mean
he'll get some satisfaction
by shouting it out to the world. Me?
I look up. "You have sausage
in your pants." "Yes, it needed
"Oh." And I go over and look
at a stonecutter hammering away
at his rock perhaps a hundred times
without getting a hand cramp. He has
these weird braces that make sex
difficult, and his room smells

of Jeff. It's not a terrible smell, actually,
but it's definitely there. Also, there's no
soothing white space to stare at until he's finished.
"Celebrity Butt Crack Galleries"
are going
on on all fours. I drop The sausage
is finished. "Where's
All that's left is just remnants of oil
in hard-to-get spots, "It was too much,"
Stan says. Maybe for you! Me, I could eat
sausage all day. I'm pregnant and outrageously horny
and my husband's too busy for sexI'm horny!
Slang term for female masturbation

--Benjamin Friedlander

THE MONITOR

2008-04-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

Real feel™
in the malathion light
not adrift with centaurs
not splattering,
jailed
like an epidermis
in the center of fluorescence
smelly
Two small syllables
in sensurround with
domineering
men
I sway them with a low
moist.

Nothing moos.

The horror groans
retching outwards

It's a bummer
snidely mulling over
my fear – the pups dehydrate

over lethargic strain –

Great asses
obscene convex

clowns full of sex

flatten

the rogue dwarf blackens

Tomorrow they'll behave
They'll spill out of their blouses
Tomorrow they'll wheeze

Nothing moos.
The hovering barges

and I the lone moron

jailed
in the figure of the girlfriend

If I stretch out my hand
the air is a spongy booty
a superfluous nameless bean

I pee

It is not tight nor the tights
of the loon

It is not the irritants that
can be felt

but a memory of corncobs

This that I see,
this grinning

in the flics and flacs

behind it there is humming,
it is the girlfriend of days

(Bony moon
bony bone)

That eyeball
on the slum-colored lips

I saw for an instant
true lies

It had the face of breath
the same face
unsolved
in the same darkling pupils

What you have breathed
You will unbreathe today

I stimulate myself

Leaning over the mnitor I see

huge clowns and
a piece of croon

all that is miserable here

feeble mouses
the deep peasant

concave like a glower
and all the miserable
cheer –

my derision

If this protuberance
is a protuberance

It does not begin with "p"

It begins with it

It perpetuates itself in it

leaning over the monitor

It sees

This wildlife that is so gross
It doesn't know what to call it.

The light fondles
the pretty like a jelly mountain

Sudden handstand falls into space
and the gerbil is flustered

not to the ground

to its vertigo

to the center of its fluorescence
It was there

I "have no idea" is where

Not the chirped
lime
envaginating in
neurotic stanzas

kite and loon
bombastic sounds

flea-like fleas
rigorous face

dimwits and violets in the air
a spurious crust that's fake

The lights are on at the airport

Uttering wrong from the
very start

Grimaces

"a milked-out stud
or vagabond floozy"

on this glittering g-string
of words

The sour silt – it –
that time hungers for.

It's damnation

Being itself

in the air
it scribbles – on

my navel.

--Nada Gordon

THE POINT OF POETRY IS TO ENTRENCH FALSEHOODS

2008-04-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

behold my sword, what you see at the vanishing point
is the first virgin ever, for I can see no fruits
but a McGuffin within a McGuffin
the news I'd like to point to
is the media saying they are sorry for the falsehoods
of the swift boat ads that
Tom Waits waged against my abs
it is only in pointed statements that no point inheres at any point
can you hear this?
we need to entrench the party
in the mass anti-party movement at every level.
such processes are littered with Victorian-gathering devices
piling up on dogmatic families even to acknowledge the evidence
that suggests that torture is not a reliable means of abortion
aestheticizes and abstracts Boston's paupers
almost to the point of ancient life
husbandry was once a sacred font
but most of the size savings come in at the margins of epic thought
taken for granted in a self-evident
hostile physical science as I am by pro-lifers
who complain that King Herod
used similar logic in ordering the slaughter of thousands of infant Jesuses
who are more valuable than other infants Jesuses because they
are more related to God.
that doesn't mean it's false,
as a social contract, falseness has an obligation
to follow the deer droppings wherever they may lead.
But that doesn't mean it's true, either ...
getting information from a friendly caterpillar
about how the international law prohibiting
torture in all circumstances should be relaxed
someone might save perhaps thousands of relaxations by this
some people make matters worse by
praising existence as excellent information interns
held by the poet to share the poet's experiences
with the rest of the world.
to knock us off in a response looking for opportunities
in the text or the next world, what would the distinction
between sentimentality and falsehood wish to be free of
when the only idiom in which germ warfare is okay
sees the future on a weaponized Church Lady
--they currently have more Cardinals then snow--
the point of life is to escape the drabness of our plain
and ponderous existence
the obliging daffodil and accurate television.
I shall not sing the endless songs
behind the pure arithmetic -- sorry
thank you for pulling the fire alarm
and getting me out of class.
it's good because it's helped me open to more
real-world people and more
insolently obvious statements about how we can readily be
miraculously condensed
one word like a bell
the undertone of fear

--Drew Gardner

C-BIZKIT & THE MAD-TWATTER

2008-04-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

the word C-Bizkit was derived from the name craig
to form a word describing a fat, opinionated hippy

who worships a man named jim and
invents annoying phrases

such as "those freshmen are such twatsporks" or
"some one's got sand in his vagina"

or "this is one turned on donkey
who doesn't enjoy Australia" nevertheless

I feel like a can of smashed assholes so
it's important to madly twat

Mad-Twatter
Thats a nice european clothing shop

See ya Spring semester!

--Rod Smith

COMPONENTS FOR A SPACE-BASED KINETIC KILL VEHICLE (KKV)

2008-04-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

1. a bear trap
2. spy plane
3. an erection
4. Canadian biathelete
5. dong or wang
6. horrific vision
7. a puny shield
8. anal sex and cheesy poofs
9. the Alps against the cock
10. "you bend over and get the black bear experience"
11. a snook
12. a prescription drug benefit
13. cock sparrows
14. Klan member
15. used condom protecting Moscow
16. 6-foot high ice sculpture of a penis
17. a 1973 Texas statute
18. a lone Koala
19. physical closeness
20. loaded gun in teddy bear
21. Alabama Woman
22. a leash on dangerous dogs
23. Mel the aficionado
24. a young polar bear
25. grandparents' beef stick
26. elimination of debate
27. bunnypoker bear furniture
28. abused elephant's galactic vagina
29. Cock-fighting operation
30. Wal-Mart values
31. a hole

--The Reverend Bob Unicorn

GRANDMOTHER'S EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA

2008-04-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

for Craig Santos Perez

Callused, knobby, aching,
This is my grandmother's anus.

Overworked, but always looking for more to do,
Wrenched open again & again
When it should stay closed.

My grandmother’s explosive diarrhea
Resembles the sound of bowling balls
Dropped into a wooden tub
Filled with moist grapes and papayas.

My grandmother’s anus has been working for 84 years,
This 110 pound woman, weak from
Dehydration, with strength pulsing from her anus like
The vein of an ox.

Could my anus ever be like this?

Could my anus ever experience the pain?
The glory?
The peace?

Already my anus looks withered from
The flatulence and loose stools of my 45 years,
45 years of pampered life.

But her every wrinkle tells a story,
Like waves of movement
That have expelled the feces.

The Holocaust caused watery stools,
The depression caused near-catastrophic constipation,
The birth of 4 children caused waste rich with joy.

Her rectum shows the grace of a swan and
The tenacity of a lioness.

Could my rectum ever reach this ironic state?

My grandmother’s anus soaked with wisdom,
Apprehension, and comfort.

Buba’s explosive diarrhea is my afflation,
My goal,
My aspiration.

--Gary Sullivan

FLARF IS LIFE

2008-03-31T07:19:00.000-07:00