EVOLUTIONARY’S COWBOY

SAME ENEMY RAINBOW by John Coletti

John Coletti kicks some ass, unrolls his bed, gazes up at stars nobody’s paid any attention to and tells you things about them you never would realize on your own. Let alone have the tenacity to speak of.

Fair Ankles

Just saw a bulldog slug a martini

Len Elmore smoking reds sipping scotch

& that revolutionary worldliness

you loved so much

forever lost to heart relaxers

wake let birds eat pull up mugwort

coated with lipstick resistant paint

daytime snow chunk

papier-mâché buck horns

riding me, riding out

This is the partnering of glittering splash of waters with a shade of rye whiskey: a once bashful Venus glowing brite pink as she finally gets over herself and lets you see her whole vocabulary. Just the sort of thing every hoped for glimpse is set atremble over. Coletti handles the thing with the superb grace of a downtown hollerer. His meanness is as brutal as happy ass batshit is sly. Meaning (as far as such goes) gets re-whacked, expanding like a cluster of flowering wishes for anti-germ breath mints. The world is renewed.

When you get to writing poems down whatever is the object of your intent is as useless a thing as what isn’t. This ain’t circular logic. After all, Intent (as such) itself is bogie numero uno. The act of writing is exploratory—or better be, given what reality we face assigned the task of sorting out our endeavors. Quelling the tide of the ever-rising noise which encircles the arbitrary spheres of our social quacking, to knicker-box the damn thing out and stand it up in a company of its peers is no small task and Coletti exceeds any fucking available standard. Hell, he is the standard. His ear is by turns both exuberant and skilled in excision.

High Standards

Christian spaced out, slowly alive

holds her wrappers

from inside night owls drag

knuckles blank leaves

ain’t supposed to hunt cougar

smoke hardest stuff dying

glue two papers together

pig roast tomorrow

no fear, no envy, no meanness

There are no precedences for this. Coletti has some company with peers such as Jeff Butler and Edmund Berrigan, but he heads out into his own waters, splashing around and having a great time all on his own, out-pounding Clark Coolidge as-ifs and chiseling messages addressed to the after glow of after, after on passing bits of driftwood or coral, deep down. There have even been reports of great white sightings where the JTBC (John “The Beast” Coletti) logo was emblazoned on tail fins with a poem running down the fish’s belly. I hear he doesn’t even use scuba gear either, just a mask and snorkel.

All this rubbish talk gets thrown around categorizing poetry into School of Quietitude, Flarf, post-Language, other what-have-yous and none of it gets anywhere. Poetry isn’t so different than anything else, it’s politics baby. Who you know and how you know them gets your foot in the door. And like all other fields of life it doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. The important thing is that none of that shit enters into the poem or interferes with getting to the poem. What is wanted remains a first hand accounting of what’s there— whether that “there” is interior, exterior, anterior, or whatever the point is to give the whole thing up in the process of discovering just where you is. Coletti manages to be knocking around the lines like no other and most importantly doesn’t worry anything about what “should be” or any other manner of bullshit. He’s looking to put down something that is what it is, nothing more and nothing less.

The only response is a wild surmise. The pleasure of reading Coletti is as cool as the California coastal expanse.

NASA Skyway

Pony nightgown

April exurban

corporate park

whole states move

through slatted sky

pretend a sky

clever pom-pom

canary pink

Notice how the syllabics clink through the lines. The texture is of a spiky softness awash with great swatches of cozy fur. Whoever writes these poems is one spaced out dude. This is the kind of stuff brings a childhood delight to the grown up world of starchiness and forgotten romance. Poets are ministers of relief and despair; will the world but listen. It doesn’t even matter.