Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books, including All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound; editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center; co-editor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998); and host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series. He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

One More for the Road

Like comedy never strikes the same place
More than a couple of times unless you
Change costumes and dance with me, dance

Till the furniture turns to props and
All the mops are a chorus of never
Before heard improbabilities, honeyed alibis

For working too hard, mowing the Astroturf,
Cranking the permafrost, watering the microprocessors
On the kids’ conveyor belts. The bird never

Flies as high as an old-fashioned kick
In the carbonization. --They gave me till
Friday to let them know if the job would

Ever be complete. We’re getting there, just
Fall a little further behind by day
And after dark it’s a mule’s paradise.

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Comment

Comment by Nikki Reimer on December 16, 2009 at 6:41pm

yep. heavy.

Comment by Alex Leslie on December 16, 2009 at 5:33pm

whoa.